August, 2004

Have you looked at the SDK example working with Envelopes in BizTalk 2004 for Flat Files and tried to get it to work with XML Documents? Well, I did and I found it a little trickier than I expected. Key Take Home Points: - De-Batching / Envelope Processing for XML Document must take place on the Receive Port. I have not been able to get it to work on the Send Port, but I am still trying. - Properties can be promoted from the Header and demoted to the single messages - No custom pipelines are required...

Topics Covered: - Custom promoted properties inside a pipeline - Schema Property: “Property schema base” - Direct binding to the message box I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks working with promoted properties through property schemas. I was using the standard approach, to simply set the promoted properties inside the schema. This, in turn, would allow the properties to be promoted inside the pipeline with no additional effort on my part. This led me into working with custom...

Scott posted a message back in June about untyped receive ports inside on Orchestration. Untyped Messages means you receive or send a message as System.Xml.XmlDocument rather then a specific schema type. This is an incredibly powerful feature in BizTalk 2004! Business Case : Lets say you want to have one Orchestration (i.e. a single business process) to process many different types of messages all in the same way. Additionally, say you want to change some values in your message and send all of your...

Did anyone read Kevin Smith’s blog on ACK/NACK and run out to try it? Well, I did and found it a more time consuming then I expected. I have put together a sample that shows how to catch the SOAP exception and get access to the error message. I hope that after looking at this sample Kevin’s excellent post on NACK’s will make a little more sense. It did for me. DOWNLOAD: Get the sample here! Set-up is easy, just unzip the SampleNACK folder and put it on your C: drive. Then, build...

I need to start off with a note about the Parallel Sequential Convoy sample that I am working on. I am still working on it and it will probably be a few weeks before it is ready to be posted. I have a sample working that does Parallel Sequential processing of a single message type. I am now trying to get that to work with multiple message types in a single Orchestration, although I think this breaks one of the rules of convoys. In any case, please check back later for that sample. In the mean time...

I saw a recent post on Scott’s Blog about what’s valid inside an expression shape . It gave a helpful list of expressions that are not allowed inside the Expression Shape. I was surprised by one of the items in the list, the “if”. I had been using “if” inside an Expression Shape in the Beta. I wondered if this was no longer possible in the RTM release. So, I set up a simple sample project to test this out. First off, you might ask: “Why would you not use...

Updated 8/8/2005: Please note the information below is outdated and I would never recommend mapping messages of this size inside Biztalk 2004. Biztalk 2006 will have support for larger messages by breaking up the message into chunks. More information on large message support can be found on the Performance Blog . Original Post: Ok, I hear it all the time: “Can BizTalk handle large files?” But, really the question should be: “How large of a file do you want BizTalk to process?”...