Using Collections as Properties in BizTalk Pipeline Components

Home Page › Forums › BizTalk 2004 – BizTalk 2010 › Using Collections as Properties in BizTalk Pipeline Components

Viewing 2 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • January 7, 2008 at 10:15 AM #18732
      community-content

        Hello Everyone:

            I am currently working with a pipeline compnent that is respoinsible for selecting the contents of Excel files and turning that into XML. A recent change ( i.e. bug ) requires me to interrogate the Excel file for particular headers. I want to make this dynamic and configurable from the BizTalk AdminConsole and so I thought of using a collection.

        When I build the pipeline component and re-install it into Visual Studio and look at the properties of the component, VS gives me the “…” button so that I can add items to the collection, however, when I deploy to BizTalk there is no “..” button and when I debug I see that the value is being read in as a string.

        My collection only needs to store strings, so I have tried string[ ] and Arraylist ( would have tried List<string>, but we all know that BizTalk doesn’t work well with generics ) as the type for my property with the same results.

        Does anyone have any experience with this? I am wondering if there is a certain attribute I can put on the property to make this work.

        Any suggestons would be helpful and appreciated. Thanks.

        Kevin Parkinson

         

      • January 7, 2008 at 7:57 PM #18736
        community-content

          I think this is actually a limitation of the BizTalk Admin Console.  I think I’ve seen something about it on Jon Flanders blog some time ago. 

          I’d probably go the poor man’s way out use Strings or Bools or read it from a config file.

          Best of luck.

        • January 8, 2008 at 6:23 PM #18748
          community-content

            Kevin,

            Stephen is completely right. Basically, the Admin Console doesn’t support custom type editors, which is what the pipeline editor in VS uses to drive the admin experience (I think it was done to avoid depending on VS stuff), so the end result is pretty basic. For anything other than strings or simple numbers, the admin console per-config instance thingie is pretty useless.

        • Author
          Posts
        Viewing 2 reply threads
        • The forum ‘BizTalk 2004 – BizTalk 2010’ is closed to new topics and replies.