Thanks for comment. There are indeed more ways to solve these kind of problems.

I usually create a specific document with the nodes needed for a decision in it. In this case that would be two elements, Name and IsJohn.

Then in the Orch i would construct a message from an xml fragment. Both nodes would be present, Name would be empty and IsJohn would be false.

Then I would assign the name to the node in the message (wich is by now a promoted property)

I would call de Business Rule Engine and let it do it’s job. I would pickup the IsJohn value and map that to a new docuemnt, or set it directly in the new message…