BizTalk Tips and Tricks – Promoting properties from a collection.

Only non-repeatable fields can be easily promoted from within the schema editor. At the end of the day however it’s simply an xpath statement. In rare cases, if you need to promote a repeatable field from a collection, you can simply modify the xpath contained within the schema and change the xpath to point to a specific index within the collection. Internally, BizTalk simply applies the xpath to the message when its time to promote the data. There is no reason why the xpath couldn’t be restructured to evaluate to a field within a collection at a given index (such as 0). The need might be rare, but it can be done if needed.

BizTalk Best Practice - Message Decoupling in Orchestrations

Have you ever found it annoying to change message schema types in an orchestration when the orchestration designer forces you to disconnect or unwire all the shapes that reference the message? There is a clever way around this and in the end, it promotes good design and adds another layer of decoupling and indirection to your messages in orchestrations.

Define all of your Messages in an orchestration from Multipart Schema Types.

If you create a message from a schema and assign it to a receive shape and that receive shape is connected to a logical port, if you need to change that message type, you need to first disconnect the “wire” between the receive shape and the port before the designer allows you the change the message type. Imagine if the message was referenced by lots ports and shapes. You would need to disconnect all of them and that could be a real pain.

If on the other hand you create a multipart message type for each schema and create each message in the orchestration from the appropriate multipart message type, you don’t need to unwire the various references to the message if you need to change the underlying schema type of a message. This might not be directly obvious, adds an abstraction layer around your message types and enhances overall maintainability.

BizTalk 2006 – Deep Technical Training

I’m attending an internal BizTalk 2006 deep dive training session given by one of the BizTalk product team members at Microsoft who is close to the product internals and has lots of practical knowledge. It’s being held for both Microsoft and Virtual Technical Specialists. It’s not your typical deep dive and focuses heavily on architecture, farms, high availability, best practices, tuning, internals, considerations when designing solutions, and more. It’s been a long, but very cool week so far.

As time permits, I’ll begin posting interesting things we’ve discussed along the way. You might not come across anything new, but if you do, great! Most are common sense and good engineering practices; however others could be things you simply haven’t thought about yet or practices you haven’t followed. Given the flexibility and breadth of the product there are always going to be new things to consider.

BizTalk Server 2006 Documentation Update

Microsoft released an update to the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation on 10/10/2006. It can be found here BizTalk 2006 Documentation Update (41.6 MB)

Overview
In this Help Update, you'll find the following content:

• Complete documentation for all BizTalk Server Line of Business Adapters, including new tutorials, one for each adapter. See the section "Using Adapters."



• Troubleshooting guidance for each of the native BizTalk adapters. See the section "Troubleshooting Adapters."



• Troubleshooting Instructions for how to capture a memory dump. See the section "How to Capture a Memory Dump of a BizTalk Process."



• Disaster recovery instructions for backing up and restoring your BizTalk Server and databases. See the section "Backing Up and Restoring BizTalk Server"



• Updated Tutorials. See the section, "BizTalk Server 2006 Tutorials"



• Information for improving fault tolerance. See the section "Planning and Architecture"



• Updated Developer's Reference that now includes the BAM namespaces that were not included in the RTM documentation. See the section "Developer's Reference"

BizTalk 2006 R2 B2B/EDI WebLog

The Microsoft BizTalk Product Development team is launching the B2B/EDI WeBlog on the MSDN platform to communicate feature/functionality relating to EDI, AS2 and HIPAA in BizTalk Server 20006 R2. Key objective of the blog is to increase product awareness and also assist with partner readiness thereby leading to a successful launch of the EDI Technology in R2.

The blog can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/BizTalkB2B/