Wow. I was in the middle of working on a blog post about message construction and the Business Rules Engine (BRE) in Biztalk 2004.
Several other Biztalk Developers and I were talking about this topic at Tech Ed and at the BPI Conference. I looked at Richard’s Blog and he posted an excellent post on the exact same topic!
At first glance, it looks like the BRE changes an immutable message or does it?
The long and short of it is:
No: the BRE does not change an immutable message
Yes: the Call Rules Shape does construct a message without using a construct shape
Yes: you can lose Context properties in the are set on your original message inside the Orchestration (see Nishil’s post for more info)
That got me thinking… I wonder if you put a persistence point after setting the Context Property if you would still lose the value?