Mapping – Inner loop

Hello Gurus,

I looked in the forums about my particular situation and didn’t see anything that was relevant.  I hope this is not a duplicate scenario.

I’m having a difficult time getting a looping structure to work properly in the Biztalk Mapper.  I can only get the parent or the child elements to loop, but never both of them.  Here is a simplified version of my incoming schema.

<Case><Student>

  <Name />

  <Dob />

  <OtherPersonalDetails />

  <Guardian>

    <Name />

    <Dob />

    <OtherPersonalDetails /></Guardian>

  <Parent>

    <Name />

    <Dob />

    <OtherPersonalDetails /></Parent>

</Student>

<Tutor>

same structure as above

</Tutor></Case>

My destination schema is much simpler.

<Person>

  <name />

  <dob />

  <otherdetails />

<Person>

I need to somehow loop over Student, Student’s Guardian (if it exists), Student’s Parent (if it exists), Tutor, tutor’s Guardian (if it exists), and the tutor’s parent (if it exists).  Afterall, they are all simply <people> in my destination.  When I try to set up the loop, I am getting not enough <person> elements and duplicated data in the field.  I can see why that’s happening, I just don’t know how to fix it.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One other thing, I was able to accomplish the above using the table looping fuctoid and table extractor.  My real schema is much more complicated than the above so likely if I really build with the table extractor I would have many rows and many more columns.  I would really like to avoid that solution unless there is a more intuitive way to configure the table using something other than the Biztalk “Configure Table Looping Grid”.

I’ve also thought of another solution, that I doubt would fall into the “Best Practices” category.  That is to do the parent looping in one transform and then the child looping in another transform and then join the two messages.

Thank you for any insight you can provide.

Regards,

Bart