Where Generated Articles Appear

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Documentation only helps when people find it where they work. Articles from Generate Articles from BizTalk are linked to the things they describe, so architects find them on the Repository Model, operators in Monitor Views, and everyone on C4 diagrams.

Understanding How Articles Are Linked

An Integration Article (blue) reaches readers three ways: through its Repository Integration and the bound entities (teal), through Monitoring Resources in Monitor Views (orange), and on C4 diagram nodes, either stored by the run (green) or inferred when the diagram is shown (yellow, dashed). Which links are made is decided by the Binding options in the wizard; see Generate Articles from BizTalk.

What a Generated Document Contains

Wherever it appears, a generated document is more than a summary. This is the Building Block of the orchestration Lab.Orders.i0100_OrderFlow, generated with Orchestration design set to ODX as Mermaid and designer image. Every Integration Article whose routes pass through the orchestration includes it, so a reader of the Integration Article in a Monitor View scrolls straight into this design.

The designer image in the Article. Click it for full size.

Facts: where the orchestration runs, and its logical ports with what they are bound to:

Calls or starts: the orchestrations it calls or starts, here Call Lab.Orders.i0100_Called.

Orchestration Design: the shapes as a Mermaid flowchart read from the ODX, with shape names and no expression code: Receive and Send shapes, Decide and Listen branches, Loops, Scopes with their Catch and Compensation blocks, and Parallel actions. Below it is the designer image, as the BizTalk Monitoring Agent read it from the deployed assembly (right).

Generation Info: the generator, the BizTalk environment, a model hash, and the options of the run. Run the generation again with the same options to reproduce the document.

To leave the designer details out, or to redact more, see Sensitive Data in Generated Articles. The options are set in Generate Articles from BizTalk.

Integrations List and Entity Pages

Each Integration Article is linked to its own Repository Integration, found or created by the Article's title. The Article badge on the Integrations list and the Articles card on the Integration's page show it. The page says which Article documents it, for example Documented by the BizTalk Integration Article …, and the card marks the Article Linked by a generator. The same applies to the Services, Message Types, System, and Endpoints the run binds. The Integration page also has Edit BizTalk routes and Refresh from BizTalk; see Document from the Repository.

The Articles card on a Repository Integration created by the run, with its generated Integration Article.

Monitor Views

Articles linked to Monitoring Resources, through the Services that Add Monitoring creates, open from those Resources in Monitor Views. Operators read the design next to the live state.

The Article button on the Resource's row.

Click the Article button to read the generated Article next to the live state. The panel shows the start of the Integration Article; scroll for the rest, including the Building Blocks it includes. See What a Generated Document Contains.

C4 Diagrams

In the Details panel of a C4 diagram node, each Article in the Articles section shows its origin with a pill; hover over the pill for its full meaning:

An inferred Article appears where the facts say it belongs. For example, a shared hub receive port shows every Integration Article whose routes pass through it, on every diagram generated from the same BizTalk group. Pin an inferred Article to store it as a manual link. One Article is shown once, under its strongest origin.

The Articles of a C4 node with their origin pills. Pin an inferred Article to keep it as a manual link.

The panel opens next to the diagram when you select a node.

A node without Articles says so. The panel lists only the node's own Articles; the diagram's Tags are edited in the diagram's edit dialog and shown on the Diagram Sets list.

Articles and Snippets Lists

The Articles list, and the Snippets list for Building Blocks, have two filters for generated documents:

• Generated by: BizTalk, Shipped by Nodinite, or Not generated for hand-written documents.
• Generation run: the documents one run wrote. Each run is listed with its date, the generator, and how many documents it created and changed. The run result's Show the Articles of this run and Show the Building Blocks of this run links open the list with this filter set.

The C4 Diagram Sets list has the same Generated by filter, and With Selected with Delete and Permanently Delete.

The Articles list with the Generated by and Generation run filters set.

Pick the run whose documents you want to see.

Relationships and the dependency views answer which Articles include this Building Block?; see Reading Articles.

Next Steps

• Sensitive Data in Generated Articles
• Keeping Generated Articles Up to Date

Related Topics

• Generate Articles from BizTalk
• Integrations
• Monitor Views
• C4 Diagrams
• Reading Articles