The text below is based on the beta release of BizTalk 2010. It might not (completely) apply to the RTM release.
This blog post is part of a series of blog posts about my favorite new features in the BizTalk 2010 mapping tool. You can find an overview here.
Relevance view is a nice new feature that especially comes in very handy if you work with large schemas. It allows you to focus only on the relevant nodes for the links. Consider the following sample where I use the big EDI schema “EFACT_D98B_APERAK”. Imagine I want to concatenate two nodes in the source schema using a functoid. The first node is on top of the schema while the second node is on the bottom of the schema. (This concatenation probably does not make sense but that is because I don’t know much about EDI (and want to keep it that way 
)).
Without relevance view the complete link structure won’t fit on the screen. To be able to see how the nodes are linked we need to scroll up and down. This is the top half of the link:
We cannot see the bottom of the link and need to scroll down to it:
If we turn on relevance view all the non-relevant nodes are collapsed or coalesced so that we get a clear view of how the whole link goes from source to functoid to destination:
The mapper applies a couple of rules to either collapse a node or coalesce a node. If the node has no links it is collapsed. If a node or its child nodes have links groups of successive nodes are coalesced. Coalesced nodes are indicated by this icon:
By clicking the icon the nodes are expanded. The opposite icon is displayed to coalesce the nodes again:
You can toggle relevance view for the schema by pressing this button in the mapper ribbon:
As you can see you can toggle relevance view for the source and destination schema independently.
Another great feature in my top list of new mapper features.
In the next post we will be looking at ‘Suggestive Matching’.
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