Yes. The Active Directory Receive Adapter can be used to create a Receive Location that queries Active Directory at regular intervals and submit the results to your BizTalk application. A message can be submitted to BizTalk at every polling interval, or only when a change occurs in the query results (this is the "On Change Only" option on the Active Directory Receive Adapter property configuration).
In addition, the Active Directory Send Adapter can be used with a Solicit-Response Send Port to perform an on-demand query. You just send your query parameters to the send port in a message that conforms to the supplied schema, and receive your results back in a new message.
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Yes. The adapter will return any exceptions back to your application AFTER any retries you have configured have been done.
Within your orchestration you can use Scope shapes to catch exceptions. In your exception handlers you can retrieve the error description to determine which way to branch.
Sample orchestrations that illustrate exception handing are included in the ActiveADAPTER Samples folder.
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The Send Adapter commits changes per message and per object. This means commits cannot span messages. Within a message, changes to an object are all committed together. To ensure changes are all or nothing, therefore, the strategy you need to use is one message per object.
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