Hi all

I am doing a lot of functoid implementation these days, and therefore, I have for instance decided to find out what these FunctoidCategories are and where in the toolbox the different categories belong.

In the toolbox, we have the following groups of functoids:

• String
• Mathematical
• Logical
• Date/Time
• Conversion
• Scientific
• Cumulative
• Database
• Advanced

I still remember my first custom functoid - I was really expecting that in my code I could decide in which group my functoid should appear and maybe even create my own group. But that isn't the case. There are 24 different FunctoidCategories that I can assign my functoid, and only the above 9 groups. You can read more about the different functoid categories here. Basically, I will just give a very short resumé of this information and then I will match each category to a group in the toolbox, so you have this information for future reference.

So, this is what I know:

Category	Toolbox group	Description
Assert	Advanced	For internal use only.
Conversion	Conversion	Converts characters to and from their numeric representation, and to convert numbers from one base to another.
Count	Advanced	For internal use only.
Cumulative	Cumulative	Performs various kinds of accumulation of the value of a field that occurs multiple times in a source document and outputs a single output.
DatabaseExtract	Database	For internal use only.
DatabaseLookup	Database	For internal use only.
DateTime	Date/Time	Adds date, time, date and time, or add days to a specified date, in output data.
ExistenceLooping	Advanced	For internal use only.
Index	Advanced	For internal use only.
Iteration	Advanced	For internal use only.
Keymatch	Advanced	For internal use only.
Logical	Logical	Controls conditional behavior of other functoids to determine whether particular output data is created.
Looping	Advanced	For internal use only.
MassCopy	Advanced	For internal use only.
Math	Mathematical	Performs specific numeric calculations such as addition, multiplication, and division.
NilValue	Advanced	For internal use only.
Scientific	Scientific	Performs specific scientific calculations such as logarithmic, exponential, and trigonometric functions.
Scripter	Advanced	For internal use only.
String	String	Manipulates data strings by using well-known string functions such as concatenation, length, find, and trim.
TableExtractor	Advanced	For internal use only.
TableLooping	Advanced	For internal use only.
Unknown	Advanced	For internal use only.
ValueMapping	Advanced	For internal use only.
XPath	Advanced	For internal use only.

To see this for your self, download

. Unzip the zip file, copy the dll to "%BTS%\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions", where %BTS% is the installation folder of BizTalk. Then go to VS.NET 2005 and reload the toolbox. If you want use one of the functoids, remember to also GAC the dll. All the functoids have the exact same implementation, but they do not generate the same XSLT by the mapper because of the chosen category. Perhaps a new blog post on that later on...

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eliasen