Recently I had a situation where I had to remove an activity from one of the BizTalk Systems and there is no definition file available.
But in order to remove the Activity from BizTalk, we need the correct definition file. We use the below command to remove an activity from BAM Primary Import DB.
bm.exe remove-all -DefinitionFile:MyDef.xml
Since we didn’t have the definition file, I wasn’t able to remove the Activity.
Luckily there is an option to get back all the definition files from BizTalk. It is documented here.
Below is the command.
bm.exe get-defxml -FileName:abc.xml
If you don’t specify the full path, abc.xml will be saved in the same folder where your bm.exe exists (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\Tracking)
Note that the xml file “abc.xml” generated by the above command will have details of all the activities, views, alerts. You will have to edit the file and choose only the activity that you need.
An easy way to find the dependencies is – select the activity and search the XML file using the ID value
Once you get the Activity Definition file, you can regenerate the Excel file by using Import option in BAM Add-In
