I have a BizTalk receive port monitoring an FTP location. I expect a file to arrive at least once per day in that location and for BizTalk to pick it up and kick off an orchestration. This part is working fine.
However, sometimes the sender fails to send a message during a day, in which case I want an email to sent to notify the users that something is amiss.
I could solve this outside of BizTalk, by creating a daily job that looks in our database for processed files and makes sure there is at least one in any given day. However, I'd prefer to solve this "in line" with the BizTalk solution that is already in place, and not deploy a separate, unrelated job which will increase maintenance headaches.
Is there any functionality in BizTalk that would allow me to send a notification if a receive port doesn't receive something in a given timeframe?
Short answer: Not really.
The logic you want to implement would require a customised version of the FTP Adapter. Depends on how comfortable you are rolling up your sleeves and getting into the Adapter SDK.
If you wanted to keep your solution "Purely BizTalk", you could set up a secondary Orchestration using a SQL Receive Location tied to a stored procedure. This stored procedure executes regularly and looks for records in your "Processed File" table received in the past (business) day. If none are found, it fabricates a record and returns it via the SQL Receive Location. This would be your trigger to send the email notification.