BizTalk Messages

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.

The mapper in BizTalk 2010 now has three different ways to display a link. The idea is that the readability of a map is enhanced by this feature, especially when we need to deal with big schemas with many links. Consider the following sample:

The links for which we can see both the source and destination element are displayed as normal lines (1). The links for which we only see one element (in this case the destination element) are dashed and grayed out (2). The links for which we cannot see both the source and destination element are displayed as thin grayed out lines (3).

Additionally the toolbar has a button that allows the developer to completely hide the links of type 3. This is the button:

If we press it, the links of type 3 are indeed hidden which further improves the readability:

The next post will be about ‘Highlighting selected objects’.

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.

Sometimes functoids and links are mixed up in the screen so that you cannot easily see to which elements they belong:

The highlighting selection feature will help you by emphasizing the select element, links and functoids. All the other links and functoids are grayed out. This is what happens when I select the ‘Lastname’ element in the source schema:

As you can see the relevant links and functoids are emphasized while the non-relevant are made opaque. This new feature will improve productive as it allows you to quickly see what is relevant for the piece of the map you’re currently work on.

This is also true for functoids selection. If I select the concatenate functoid for example all relevant links and functoids of that are emphasized:

If one the elements for your current selection is on another page in the map this is also shown. Let’s add another page to the map and also link the ‘Lastname’ field from there:

When I switch back to page 2 and select the ‘Lastname’ node again the mapper shows me that the other page also has link(s) from the same element. The mapper does this by showing a little icon in on the page tab:

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.

As you might now the grid area of the BizTalk mapper is a lot bigger than the area shown on the screen. In some cases you might have functoids somewhere on the grid area but not visible on the screen:

To get an idea of the complete link structure you had to manually scroll the grid up and down. In BizTalk 2010 this can be done automatically. This feature is called ‘auto scrolling’ and can be toggled using a button in the mapper ribbon:

If we press the button and select the relevant node the functoid is connected to (in this case the ‘Gender’ node) the relevant functoids are automatically brought into view:

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.

In previous versions of the mapper there was limited support for searching elements in the source or destination schema. The new mapper has extensive support for searching. Two great things of the new search are:

· Search happens instantly (while you type)

· You can define the scope of the search by setting search options. The search is not limited to elements in the schemas.

Searching is done by typing in the mapper ribbon:

You can even search within the content of functoids (when turned on). When I have two C# scripting functoids with the following code:

public string MyConcat(string param1, string param2)

{

return param1+param2;

}

public string MyConcat(string param3, string param4)

{

return param3+param4;

}

I can search for this code. When the mapper finds the searched string the functoids that contain the string are highlighted.

Searching for string ‘param’ highlights both the functoids:

Searching for string ‘param3’ highlights only the second functoid: