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.

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’.

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.

This is by far the coolest new feature. In complex mappings with big schemas it might be very hard to find the node in the destination schema to link to. With suggestive matching the mapper can help.

Say I want to map from the source element ‘Lastname’ to a corresponding element in the destination schema but imagine the schema is too big to easily find the destination node. This is how it works: I select the ‘Lastname’ element in the source schema right click and choose ‘Indicate matches’ from the context menu that appears:

The mapper automatically finds the most relevant nodes in the destination schema by doing a name match. It draws the suggested links on the map surface:

By using the arrow keys I can loop through the suggested nodes. If I have found the correct one I just press enter and the link is added for me:

For the small schema above this might seem like a little overkill but in big schemas that span outside the screen bounds these feature is absolutely very useful.

The next feature is about the optimized display of links.

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: