1. promoting properties (including the message type)
2. validating incoming documents (if turned on)
3. disassemble batches into body messages

Sometimes situations can occur where you want to process an envelope message but you don’t want to have it disassembled into separate body messages.

For example when receiving a message that contains a lot of data in the header of the envelope that is needed in the body of a message further on in the process. You then ideally want to use a map to copy over this header data into another message. If the port receiving this message uses the XmlDisassembler component the envelope will be processed and the header information is “gone”.

You can of course promote everything in the header to the context but that leads to a lot of data in the context. Besides that a considerable amount of code (distinguished fields and xpath statements in expression shapes) is needed to get the context properties into the message later on.

Another and, in my view, more elegant way to do this is by setting the value of a special property to true on the context of the envelope message before it is processed by the XmlDisassembler. The property is called ‘PromotePropertiesOnly’ and resides in the ‘http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/xmlnorm-properties’ namespace.

A very simple pipeline component can be used to do this:

public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pContext, IBaseMessage pInMsg)
{
pInMsg.Context.Promote("PromotePropertiesOnly",
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/xmlnorm-properties", true);

return pInMsg;
}

After setting this property will still have the functionality of the XmlDisassembler (like property promotion, setting the message type, etc.) but the debatching is skipped.

The property is available and can be used in all versions of BizTalk Server (2004, 2006 (R2), 2009 and 2010).

When you accidentally used the wrong functoid in a map you can replace it by just dragging another functoid on top of it. The old functoid is replaced with the new one. The great part is that all the input and output parameters of the functoid are preserved.

The following video shows how to do this in BizTalk 2009:

BizTalk 2009 Mapper replacing functoids

I haven’t tried but this should also work in BizTalk 2006 (R2). I don’t know about BizTalk 2004.

When trying in BizTalk 2010 I was a little bit surprised to find out that this does not work. See video below:

BizTalk 2010 Mapper replacing functoids does not work

Fortunately there are many other productivity enhancements in the BizTalk 2010 mapper so I think I can live without this replace feature .

No doubt that, of all the new and changed BizTalk 2010 features, the enhancements to the BizTalk mapper are the most salient. For the current and previous BizTalk versions a lot of BizTalk developers do not use the mapper tool. Especially when transforming big XML messages they switch back to manually writing XSLT code.

In BizTalk 2010 Microsoft has tried to make the mapper tool more powerful and more user friendly. The future will tell if Microsoft succeeded in this and if more developers are willing to use the tool for their mappings. The questions is will they start dragging or drop the mapper again?

Besides making the mapper more suitable for big transformations I think Microsoft has another reason to put so much effort into enhancing it. In the future we will probably see a broader range of .Net developers use the tool for their transformations outside BizTalk. I think in the future Microsoft will position it as the general tool to do XML or maybe even object transformations.

Anyway, in my view Microsoft did a very good job. In the following blog posts (which I will publish in the coming days) I will show my favorite and most useful new mapper features. Those are:

· Intelligent Linking (part 1)
· Functoid Intellisense (part 2)
· Relevance View (part 3)
· Suggestive Matching (part 4)
· Optimized Display of links (part 5)
· Highlighting selected objects (part 6)
· Bringing selected objects in view (part 7)
· Search support (part 8 )

I wonder what you think about the new mapper and what your favorite new features are. So please feel free to comment.

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.

Functoid intellisense is a visual improvement which shows the developer when a functoid has not been properly configured. Before BizTalk 2010 the only way to find out that a functoid was not fully configured was at compile time or even worse at run time.  With BizTalk 2010 this is different.

When we drag for example an ‘Equal’ functoid to the map this is what happens:

The functoid has an icon that shows that there is something wrong with the functoid configuration. When I hover over the functoid I’m presented a tooltip that shows me what is wrong:

Opening the properties for the functoid also shows me that the second input parameter has not been defined: (Also note the nice layout of the functoid properties window)

side note:

Besides the nice layout of the functoid properties window is also resizable now. In case of the scripting functoid the inputs and script dialogs are now unified in one single dialog. This also allows you to resize the scripting functoid code window (GREAT !!!). Furthermore you can choose to import code from a text file and set a specific script type as the default.

When I set the second parameter to a constant value and connect the output to the destination schema, there are no more icons which tells me the functoid is configured properly:

I think this feature is great because it shows in an early stage (during development) that there is something wrong with the map. This is absolutely a time safer.

The next post in this series will be about ‘Relevance View’.

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 this first post we are going to look at a new feature called ‘Intelligent linking’. When you define your schemas and add new nodes to the schema you can choose between different types of nodes. Intelligent linking only applies to nodes that you set to type ‘Record’ in the schema editor. In other words it applies only to nodes that can contain other nodes.

Intelligent linking allows you to choose the type of link for records when mapped from source to destination. The mapper will automatically show a context menu from which a link option can be selected. The context menu will only show up if we map from record to record.

In the following map (where the source schema is the same as the destination schema) the ‘Person’ node is of type ‘Record’:

When we drag the source ‘Person’ to the destination ‘Person’ the context menu automatically appears:

As shown by the context menu we have the following options to choose from:

· Direct Link
· Link by Structure
· Link by Name
· Mass Copy

Direct link will create a link from record to record. Link by structure will look at structure of the child nodes below the ‘Person’ node and will try to link them by looking at the structure or hierarchy of the nodes. Link by Name will as the name indicates look at the name of the child nodes to try to link them to the destination child with the same name. When you select the last option ‘Mass Copy’, the mapper will automatically insert a mass copy functoid and link the source to the destination:

Now if you have experience with previous BizTalk versions you might say this feature is not new. That is absolutely true. The feature was already present in previous versions of BizTalk. You could drag from source record to destination record and while holding the shift key you could do a mapping for the child nodes. The main improvement is in the usability of the feature. In the previous versions you had to go the properties of the grid/map and change the ‘AutoLink By’ property there. The bad thing was that you had to remember to set the property to the correct value before dragging a link. In other words the property was map based. Although this is still available in BizTalk 2010 we can now more easily use this feature because of the automatic popup. The property is now link based. Besides that you could only choose between the values ‘Structure’ or ‘Node Name’ for the property while you can now also choose the ‘Mass Copy’ option.

A great new feature which will dramatically improve development speed when working with big transformations where you need a lot of links.

In the next post we will be looking at ‘Functoid Intellisense’.

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’.

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.

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’.

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:

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:

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:

Usage

This is the declaration of a string variable ‘lastName’ in a very simple test orchestration:

This is the expression shape where the value of that variable is set to my last name:

This is the map that is executed using a transform shape right after the expression shape above. The map contains the variable retriever functoid. It has one parameter that takes the name of the variable to fetch.

Please pay special attention to the icon because that bloody thing took me 50% of the development time. The result shows why I try to stay away from UI development as much as possible.

Finally this is the Xml message returned from the orchestration via the file adapter.

Disadvantages

At first I was a little excited that I got this working. I did some testing with different orchestrations and it seems to work OK. After a while (and thinking this over) my excitement was tempered because I think the functoid has three big disadvantages:

1. Although questions related to this popup regularly in the BizTalk newsgroups I could not think of any real world examples. The sample above could also be implemented by using a message assignment shape after the map. In the message assignment shape the value of the variable can be assigned using xpath, properties or distinguished fields. The only way the functoid can be useful is when you need an orchestration variable value in a map to do some processing while the actual value is not mapped to the destination schema. But then again there are other ways to implement that. (Using a helper message and a multi message map). 
2.  The functoid code contains a considerable amount of reflection code. I didn’t do any performance tests but it is obvious that reflection comes with a cost. So in terms of performance it will probably be much better  to use alternative methods.
3.  This is probably not supported by MS. Mainly because it uses XLANG code which is normally hidden from the developers. 

These disadvantages make me conclude that this functoid is not very useful in real world scenarios. I really want to know what others think about this. So whether you agree or don’t agree please share your thoughts on this!

The other way around

Now that I figured out a way to access a variable it is a small step to take this a little further and build a functoid that WRITES the value of a variable in an orchestration. I didn’t implement such a functoid because of above mentioned points. I also think writing, as opposed to, reading is very tricky because you need to take things like serialization and locking into account.

If your still not convinced that you should not use this you can download the functoid “dll” from here.

Installation instructions:

• copy the .dll to the ‘Mapper Extensions’ folder which resides in the BizTalk installation folder.
• put the .dll in the gac.
• Open a map in Visual Studio, click right in the toolbox area and choose the functoids tab.
• Browse the the functoid dll in the ‘Mapper Extensions’ folder to add it to the toolbox.

The source is also available here. It is build using BizTalk 2006 R2.