Hi all

I had a post about promoting reoccurring elements in BizTalk. As we all know, this isn’t possible…. BUT… actually… well…

Basically, you promote properties for three reasons:

1. You need it to route based on the value
2. You need it for correlation (which is basically just a specialization of routing)
3. You need to either read or set the value inside an orchestration (Don’t do that! Use distinguished fields instead)

So, dealing with number 1, routing, I started thinking back at BizTalk 2002, which was my first BizTalk experience (I’l bet ALL BizTalk developers/architects think of BizTalk 2000/2002 every now and then… no? ). I seemed to recall that you could do something fancy with routing back then, so I fired up an old BizTalk 2002 on windows 2000 Professional to test it. It turns out, that on a channel you can enter a filter which is an XPath expression. The text field is editable, so you can change the XPath expression all you want – it will complain if you try to leave it with an invalid XPath expression (syntactically – not semantically).

Given this XML:

<MyRoot>
  <myReoccuringRecord Myfield="42" /> 
  <myReoccuringRecord Myfield="2" />
  <MySecondRecord MySecondField="jan" /> 
  <MyThirdRecord>
    <MyThirdField>1</MyThirdField> 
  </MyThirdRecord>
</MyRoot>

I can have a channel with this filter:

• /*[local-name()='MyRoot' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='myReoccuringRecord' and namespace-uri()=''][position()=1 and @Myfield = 42]

Basically, documents will only go through this channel, if the value of the “Myfield” attribute of the first “myReoccuringRecord” element has the value 42.

So, it isn’t promoting as such – BizTalk 2002 doesn’t have this concept, but it allows us to route based on the value of a specific occurrence  of a reoccurring element.

On a side note; If you leave the filter like this:

• /*[local-name()='MyRoot' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='myReoccuringRecord' and namespace-uri()=''][@Myfield = 42]

it will accept the incoming document no matter what the position of the “myReoccuringReord” is. Can’t make up my mind if this is a good thing or not

Now, as we all know (?), manually editing the XSD in BizTalk 2006 solution to make sure the XPath evaluation will only return a single XmlNode doesn’t work. You either get a compile time error:

• The promoted property field or one of its parents has Max Occurs greater than 1. Only nodes that are guaranteed to be unique can be promoted as property fields.

or you get a runtime error:

• There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive, Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Source: "XML disassembler" Receive Port: "ReceivePort3" URI: "C:\Projects\Blog Entries\PrommotingReoccurringElementsEditXSD\Instances\In\*.xml" Reason: Unexpected XPath format:

Anyway… not that many BizTalk 2000/2002 installations till in production, I assume, so this post is merely for informational purposes. It’s just funny discovering functionality that is doable in earlier versions of BizTalk and not in the latest versions.

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eliasen