Yes, it sounds like you’d need to call a pipeline inside the Orchestration for you read in messages if they are not XML.
Here are my answers:
- Well, it’d not really say it’s just the mapping engine but really BizTalk as a whole. Seems like a good fit.
- You should be able to construct an Xml Document inside an Orchestration and have it be anything. Never done anything with XLangMessage, but it should allow you to do that as well.
- Sure. – but see below.
- See below.
Let me get this right, you get a message in a location and then you go get a file at the location that message tells you? Any way to just have the final document end up in your file location? What you want to try to get to, is your Receive Locations to process your pipelines and convert into Xml. Some on the Send side. You can do both inside the Orchestration, but that’s just not really the best place for them.
If you can’t really change much, then I like your approach. It makes sense to me and it should work for you.
Are you just reading them using File IO? If so, I’d make sure I was doing this inside a .net component I call rather than an expression shape. Then you should be able to make that method return an XLang Message.
Hope this helps.