Hi all

If you go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/default.aspx you can see that this month I am the featured BizTalk MVP – yeah…

--
eliasen

Hi all

A couple of days ago I held two presentations at the first meeting in the Danish BizTalk User Group (DBUG).

The first presentation was about the new mapper in BizTalk 2010.
Find my presentation here:

The second presentation was about the Pipeline Component Wizard.
Find my presentation here:

Find the code samples for both presentations here:

Note that my file names, source code, and so on has “DKBUG” instead of “DBUG” because the official acronym wasn’t chosen until the meeting, so I guessed… and guessed wrong

That’s all, folks!

--
eliasen

Hi all

For those interested in the Danish BizTalk User Group (DBUG), at LinkedIn group has been created, free for everyone to join.

Find it here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3305228

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, today my boss confirmed that I can go to the event held by the Swedish BizTalk User Group. See the details of the event here: http://bugs20100908-widget.eventbrite.com/. The event says it’s a BizTalk 2010 launch party… but whether BizTalk 2010 will be out there… I don’t know.

I am really looking forward to hearing what Richard Seroter, Ewan Fairweather and Stephen W. Thomas have to say. I have preordered their book, both paper and ebook editions. Hopefully I will receive at least one of them before September 8’th where the event starts.

Also, this will actually be the first time I will meet Johan Hedberg and Mikael Håkansson, who are two of my Swedish colleagues who are both BizTalk MVPs.

Anyway, flight and hotel are booked. Look for me there!

--
eliasen

Hi all

Today I exported an MSI file from my development machine and wanted to import the MSI file on our test environment.

I got this error, though:

Change requests failed for some resources. (mscorlib)

Unable to process create change request for BizTalk binding "BindingInfo.xml". Import bindings (overwrite) failed. (Microsoft.BizTalk.ResourceManagers)

Failed to update binding information. (mscorlib)

Cannot update receive port "WcfReceivePort_FvmIndberetningCommon_CVR/FvmIndberetningCommon_CVR". (Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment)

Cannot update receive location "WcfService_FvmIndberetningCommon_CVR/FvmIndberetningCommon_CVR". (Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment)

The following items could not be matched up to hosts due to name and/or trust level mismatches:
Item: 'WcfService_FvmIndberetningCommon_CVR/FvmIndberetningCommon_CVR' Host: 'FVM_Indberetningsplatform_IsolatedHost' Trust level: 'Untrusted'
You must do one of the following:
1) Create hosts with these names and trust levels and try again
2) Re-export the MSI without the binding files and have a post import script apply a suitable binding file. (Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment)

Now, the error message is pretty easy to understand. What had me baffled was, that the host exists and it IS untrusted. So there is no mismatch and the two ideas as to what to fix don’t seem to apply to my situation.

It turned out that the issue was that after creating the needed host and host instances, I had forgotten to add the necessary Receive Hander on the appropriate adapter for the receive location. But the error message doesn’t say anything about that – it just says that I need to create the host with the right trust level.

So, this post is just to let you know that there is another reason for the error message than what the error message states.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have decided to start up a personal blog as well. I get a few complaints from people who don’t care about my personal life, and therefore, I will be moving personal blog entries to my new blog at http://jan.eliasen.dk – with an RSS feed at http://jan.eliasen.dk/syndication.axd

This blog will NOT change! Well… personal blog entries will not appear anymore, but other than that, I will still be blogging about technological abnormalities, funny things, strange things, errors, and what not…

So, for Jan, the person, go see http://jan.eliasen.dk

Thanks

--
eliasen

Hi all

The other day a developer who needs to call a BizTalk exposed web service approached me and told me that there was an error in the wsdl – something about the Response having the wrong fields.

So, I fixed it – I changed the XSD and ran the WCF Service Publishing Wizard again.

I called the developer and told him that everything was fine now. He refreshed his service reference and told me that everything was just as it was before. So I thought; Restart IIS.. and I did. Developer goes: Jan, what is wrong with you? Everything is still the same!

So now I actually need to start thinking…

Turns out, that silly I just did this:

1. Made my changes to the XSD
2. Recompiled
3. Run the Wizard

1. Point to the newly compiled assembly
2. Finish the wizard

BUT, what I forgot was to deploy the newly created assembly… or at least GAC it. Because the wizard, even though you point to a .DLL in the file system, will look for the assembly in the GAC with the same strong name and used that instead of the .DLL you chose. To me this is really silly… It could at least provide a warning that it will ignore the assembly I chose before ignoring it.

Anyway, after deploying the new assembly, everything worked just fine.

--
eliasen

Hi all

If you read the documentation for Correlation Sets (here), you will see that it clearly states that:

“Each correlation set supports a maximum of three parameters.”

Now, the documentation for BizTalk 2010 is still subject to change, but you will find the same text in the documentation for previous versions.

The funny part is, that inside the Orchestration View, you are allowed to add as many properties to your Correlation Type as you please:

You will get no compiler error, as I would have expected, and no compiler warning, either.

I implemented a small orchestration that uses the Correlation Type seen above and it looks like this:

Basically, a message in, a transformation, an output and then a response back in. The “msg_FirstOut” initializes the correlation set and the “msg_SecondIn” follows it.

As mentioned, the compiler will not complain at all and I can deploy the solution. Once I send a message through, an instance subscription is created once the send shape has finished, and this surprisingly looks like this:

As you can see, ALL five properties are used in the instance subscription, which in effect means that the documentation is wrong.

So this brings me to the point; The documentation states, that you can only have three parameters (not sure why they call them parameters) in a Correlation Set, but this actually ONLY applies to Correlation Sets used in Convoys.

If I change my solution to utilize a parallel convoy like this:

or to be a sequential convoy like this:

then I still get no compiler warning or error no matter how many properties I have in my Correlation Type, but if I deploy the solution and try to start the orchestration, I get this error message:

“The maximum number of convoy set properties has been exceeded. A convoy set can only contain up to 3 properties.”

Now, you may very well ask, what is a convoy set? And yes, it is a bit confusing that the error message uses a term that is actually internal to BizTalk and not something your average BizTalk developer cares about. But a convoy set is simply a correlation set that is used in a convoy.

So this means, that for correlation sets that are used for convoys you can only have three properties, which actually comes from the fact that the table “ConvoySets” in the MessageBox database has three columns called “uidPropertyID1”, “uidPropertyID2”, and “uidPropertyID3” which contain GUIDs that are the GUIDs of the properties in the correlation set. So since only three fields exist in the database, only three properties can be in a convoy set.

So to me, it would nice if:

1. The documentation was clear about the fact that the limitation only applies to correlation sets used in convoys
2. The compiler would provide an error if you use more than three properties in a correlation set used in a convoy so you don’t ahve to wait until starting the orchestration to find that out.

Happy correlating and convoying out there!

--
eliasen

Hi all

This is probably most useful to Danish BizTalk people… We are four guys trying to start up a Danish BizTalk User Group.

The first meeting is set to be on August 12’th with the following agenda:

1. Introduction to the User Group
2. Basic topic: The new mapper in BizTalk 2010 by Jan Eliasen
3. Advanced topic: Introduction to WF4 by Christian Stærk
4. Tools of the Trade: Pipeline Component Wizard by Jan Eliasen

So as you can see, I’ll be speaking twice :) And unless someone else has a great topic, I have an advanced topic lined up for the next meeting as well.

You can find the official invitation here:

Everyone is invited, so please spread the word and the invitation.

Thanks

--
eliasen

Hi all

I am extremely happy to announce, that today I was re-awarded the MVP title for BizTalk Server for another year.

This is my fourth MVP title and the third in a row.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I just had the funniest (NOT) experience (AGAIN) with the new BizTalk 2009 project system.

Somehow I had gotten into a situation, where I could add all the usual artifacts to a BizTalk project except schemas. I could add orchestrations, send pipelines, receive pipelines, maps, flat file schemas, property schemas, and flat file wizard schemas. So the only thing I couldn’t add was “normal” schemas.

I thought: Who cares? I can just add either a property schema or a flat file schema instead and then change the necessary properties on it to make it a normal schema, and that worked for me for some time.

Then, I was contacted by Microsoft to test out a new QFE package that they have created to fix an issue I have reported. The QFE package wouldn’t install, so i thought it might have something to do with my project system being broken, so I chose to repair my BizTalk installation.

The result was, that now I can add “normal” schemas, but I can’t add orchestrations and property schemas. Also, naturally, the QFE package still doesn’t install :-( So I ended up unconfiguring, uninstalling, reinstalling and reconfiguring. Everything seems normal now. But for how long?

I really hope they have improved the project system for BizTalk 2010.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Frequently I get emails from people looking for my help with some BizTalk challenge they are facing. Some times I just get a zipped version of a project containing schemas and other artifacts that don’t even have anything to do with the issue – it was just easier to send the entire thing and hope that I can figure it all out.

So here comes a plea from me to all you people looking for help: Please, when you send someone an email asking for help, prepare an SSCCE (See more here: http://sscce.org/).

I have plenty of things to look at, so if you take the time to prepare an SSCCE the chances of me helping you increases by a multitude of 10 :-)

Thanks!

--
eliasen

Hi all

I am just playing around with the new mapper in BizTalk 2010 beta (get it here).

I am happy to announce that the restrictions form the old versions of BizTalk regarding placement of functoids that have the output from other functoids as input has been removed.

In the “old” days (pre-BizTalk 2010 beta), you would have some of the mapper grid marked as inaccessible when you dragged a functoid that has the output form another functoid as input like this:

With BizTalk 2010 Beta you can place the functoids were you like. All links have a small arrow on them indicating the flow of information and you can therefore have a setup like this:

Very nice and more flexible, I think.

--
eliasen

Hi all

As many of you know, I am writing this book on BizTalk along side some great names of the community.

Anyway, I was just writing about the Scope shape for orchestrations and decided to go through the documentation of this to see if I missed something. And indeed there was a small detail I missed, which you can find at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560150(BTS.10).aspx – it states that “You can nest scopes up to 44 levels deep.”

I thought that was a funny number and decided to test it.

So I started adding Scope shapes and at 19 nested Scope shapes I had this:

which looks just fine. BUT, after adding an expression shape to the content of the 19’th Scope shape and adding the 20’th Scope shape I get this:

which is not fine.

So basically, the orchestration designer will not show you the Scopes at level 20 or deeper. You can still add them, though – and it compiles just fine even at 47 levels of Scope shapes, actually – haven’t bothered trying more levels than that.

Now, some of you (all of you?) may sit and wonder: Come on, how probable is it that anyone will do that? An I completely agree – if you get above 10 levels of nested Scope shapes you are most definitely going in the wrong direction :) I just wanted to see if the documentation was correct on this.

I hope this will help someone, but it probably won’t :)

--
eliasen

Hi all

At times you may run into this error at compile time: “an atomic scope may not contain a receive with a correlation filtration initialized in the same scope”. Not very many posts exist on this topic so I thought I’d just share some thoughts on it.

First of all, the error occurs because you have a Receive shape inside an atomic scope and this Receive shape follows a correlation set that is initialized within the same scope. This is not allowed, as explained here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560115(BTS.10).aspx.

The reason for this limitation is, that everything that happens inside the Atomic scope is not committed until the Scope shape finishes processing. If you at some point initialize a correlation set inside the Atomic scope, then the subscriptions for any Receive shapes that follow this correlation set cannot match the properties from the correlation type because the routing engine cannot know about the values until the Atomic transaction is committed.

If you actually could follow a correlation set that is initialized within the same Atomic scope you would end up in a deadlock because:

1. The instance subscription is not created until the transaction commits
2. The transaction does not commit until the Receive shape has its message

So as you can see, the Receive shape would never get a message and therefore the transaction would never commit.

Hope this helps someone out there.

--
eliasen

Hi all

When I run into some issues on web pages and report them, one of the things that almost always happens is that they won’t deal with your request until you have deleted all cookies and tried again. The support guys have some steps to guide the user through before they can send anything on to the second level support. And this usually includes getting the users to delete all cookies.

Now, this is bad! IF there is an issue with the cookie for a particular web site, then

1. Deal with it in your server side code
2. Don’t ask me to delete ALL cookies, but instruct me to delete the one that is the right one for your web site.

Deleting all cookies will make me start over entering usernames and passwords for lots of web sites that are really not in any way impacted by the ongoing issue the support guys are trying to solve. It may solve the problem, sure… but it sure isn’t the RIGHT way to solve the issue. The right way would be to

1. Make sure the cookie doesn’t get corrupted
2. Handle the corrupt cookie in the server side code
3. Only delete the necessary cookies and not all cookies.

Asking customers to delete all cookies is just plain lazy.

I have seen this from several web sites, and lately I actually got it from the mcp support team. I emailed them that I get this screen frequently:

As you can see, the web page instructs me to click an icon to sign in, but the icon is for signing out (Clicking it actually signs me out). Now, to me, this means that the server side code is faulty. The code generates a page that at the same time instructs me to sign in and to sign out. But, the reply from the mcp support team was that I was told to delete all cookies and try again. I have emailed them that I don’t think that is the right way to go about it and they have replied that deleting all cookies won’t do my system any harm and I should do it and get back to them. Sure it won’t harm my system, but it will for sure harm my user experience on all the web sites, whose cookies have now disappeared.

This is the way it always goes – not just with the mcp support team… I tell them it is the wrong solution and they instruct me to do it anyway.

Sigh…

--
eliasen

Hi all

I am trying out BizTalk 2010 beta, and just discovered a small glitch, will I will describe here and then email a link to the blog post to Microsoft to let them know about it.

I have a very simple solution:

I have a C# project which is a helper class, which I will be using from my orchestration in another project.

The project structure is as you can see here:

The helper class only has one class with one method which looks like this:

               1:
              private
              const
              string XPATH
= "Some XPath expression";

               2:
              public
              static
              void ChangeXmlDocument(XmlDocument
xmldoc)

               3: {

               4: xmldoc.SelectSingleNode(XPATH).InnerText
= "New value!";

               5: }

So it just changes the value of an element in the XML that is given to it as a parameter.

The second project only contains a schema:

and an orchestration:

The orchestration just picks up a message and then calls the helper class with the message as a parameter.

So, the deployment properties are set on the BizTalk project, so I right click it and choose to deploy it. It deploys fine.

I then entered BizTalk Server Administration, and created a new receive port and a receive location for it. I enabled the receive location and I bind the receive port to the Orchestrations receive port.

When enlisting the orchestration, I get this error:

Error message (For the benefit of search engines):

Could not enlist orchestration ‘strong name of orchestration’. Could not load file or assembly ‘Strong name of helper class’  or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM)

So I am thinking that the error is because I forgot to GAC the helper class and the administration console wants to alert me to this. Not sure I like that, but ok – I’ll GAC it. That didn’t help, though.

So I thought: Maybe a refresh of the administration console, so I right clicked on the application with the orchestration and chose “Refresh”. That didn’t help.

Then I thought: I’ll right click the “Applications” node in Administration console and chose “Refresh”. That didn’t help either.

Then I tried to chose “Refresh” on the BizTalk Group node in Administration Console. That didn’t help either.

So, as it turns out, there are two options to fix this error.

1. Restart BizTalk Server Administration Console
2. Add the helper class as a resource in Administration Console

Neither should be necessary, I think…

Hope this helps someone.

You can find my solution here:

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eliasen

Hi all

Today I discovered something, that AGAIN confirms, that BizTalk 2009 was simply shipped without any form of proper testing of the new Visual Studio .NET project system that they chose to switch to. I have already described lots of issues here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/07/21/IssuesWithBizTalk2009OnVSNET2008.aspx and a hotfix has been releases which I have shortly described here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2010/01/27/HotfixForIssuesWithDevelopingBizTalk2009SolutionsInVisualStudio.aspx.

Anyways, the issue is, that I created a property schema in my project, and in this property schema I created four properties. I then opened up the orchestration I had in the same project and created a Correlation Type, that used these four properties. That gave me this error:

identifier 'PropertyName' does not exist in 'ProjectName'; are you missing an assembly reference?

So basically, when compiling, the new property cannot be found. Turns out, though, that if I compile the project and THEN use the properties in a Correlation Type, then everything works just fine. What a lousy deal…

The hotfix mentioned above does not seem to rectify this issue, so this remains an issue, I think.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have just installed VMware WorkStation 7.0.1 in order to start building 64bit guest OS’es in order to try out Windows Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010. Microsoft Virtual PC does not support 64bit guest operating systems, and since I really appreciate being able to run guest operating systems in a window on my host PC I saw no other way out than getting and installing VMware WorkStation.

Now, after installing it, I tried to create my first Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine, but that failed because I hadn’t enabled Virtualization Technology (VT) in my BIOS. So I rebooted, entered BIOS and enabled it. That worked fine, and I now have a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2 64bit.

BUT, when I then wanted to fire up one of my old Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machines that I had earlier saved, I got an error saying that the saved file was corrupt. I had the choice of deleting the saved file or doing nothing. Since I needed the VPC, I chose to delete the saved file information and hope that I could recreate what was then lost.

Then, when starting up my next saved virtual machine from Microsoft Virtual PC, I got the same error. I have now played around with it, and it simply seems that if I save the state of a VPC and then turn on VT, the file gets corrupted and cannot be used :-( I even tried saving state when VT was enabled, and then I disabled it and reenabled it. Saved file was again corrupt :-(

This REALLY sucks! This means that you need to be really careful with when you save the state and when you do not…

--
eliasen

Hi all

Just to let you all know, that David GROSPELIER has written a BizTalk 2009 book in French that is about to be published.

You can find the book at Amazon and at Editions-ENI.

David has been so kind as to mention my collection of functoids from http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com several times in the book, and since it is in French, I have not bothered to check what has been written, but trust that David knows what he is talking about :-)

So… go check it out! :-)

--
Eliasen

Hi all

Lots of people think, that if they use a Parallel Actions shape, they get things done in parallel. Well, rethink that. An orchestration executes in just one thread, so no chance of getting anything to run in parallel. At runtime, the shapes in the parallel shape are simply serialized.

But what is the algorithm, then?

Well, I did some tests. First of all, I created this simple orchestration:

It’s a receive shape to fire up the orchestration and then a parallel shape with four branches and five expression shapes in each. The code in each expression shape is this:

               1: System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("X.
Y");

where X is a number indicating the branch and Y is a sequence number within the branch. This means that X=2 and Y=3 is the third expression shape in the second branch and X=4 and Y=1 is the first expression shape in the fourth branch.

Running this orchestration I get this result from DebugView:

So as you can see, the entire first branch is executed, then the entire second branch, and so on until the fourth branch has finished. Sounds easy enough. But lets try some other scenarios like this one:

In essence I have thrown in a receive shape in branch 2 to see if branches three and four will still have to wait until branch 2 has finished.

The result can be seen here:

So as you can see, the second branch stops after the second shape because now it awaits the receive shape. Branches three and four are then executed and after I send in a message for the receive shape, the second branch completes.

So some form of parallelism is actually achieved, but only when a shape takes too long to handle. Lets see what happens with a Delay shape instead like this:

I have switched the Receive Shape for a Delay shape, and I have set the Delay shape to wait for 100 milliseconds. The result of this is the same as with the Receive shape:

Then I tried setting the Delay shape to just 1 millisecond, but this gave the same result.

With shapes that take time in two branches, like this:

And the Delay is still set at one millisecond. I get the following result:

So as you can see, the Receive shape causes branch 2 to stop executing, and the Delay shape causes branch 3 to stop executing, allowing branch 4 to execute. Branch 3 is then executed because the Delay shape has finished and finally once the message for the Receive shape has arrived, branch 2 is executed to its end.

Another thing to note is, that the Delay shape actually doesn’t make the thread sleep. If it did, we couldn’t continue in another branch once a Delay shape is run. This makes perfectly sense, since the shapes in one branch are to be seen as a mini-process within the big process, and the delay that is needed for that mini-process shouldn’t affect the other branches. This is exemplified in this process:

The third expression shape in the first branch has been updated to this code:

               1: System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("1.
3");

               2: System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(2000);

So as you can see, even though the first branch must wait for 2 seconds, it still executes completely before the second branch is started.

So, takeaways:

1. The Parallel Actions shape does NOT mean you get any multi-threading execution environment.
2. Think of the PArallel Actions shape as a way of letting multiple Business Activities happen and you don’t know in what order they will occur.
3. The Delay shape does not use Thread.Sleep, but instead handles things internally.

--
eliasen

Hi all

A hot fix has been released, which is quite poorly described, but which supposedly fixes some of the issues I have described at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/07/21/IssuesWithBizTalk2009OnVSNET2008.aspx

The hotfix is available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977428/en-us

Good luck :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

Today I started receiving this error in the event log every time I tried to test my custom functoid in a map on the receive port.

A message received by adapter "FILE" on receive location "Receive Location3" with URI "C:\Projects\TestCumulativeFunctoid\TestCumulativeFunctoid\Instances\In\*Copy*.xml" is suspended.
Error details: The system cannot find the file specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070002)
MessageId:  {5C621C74-A873-4E68-84E0-D0621DF9471E}
InstanceID: {21D3DCEC-7C1C-4865-BB46-6D1BF6FAC7AA}

The map worked fine in Visual Studio and I was quite confused and even restarted my machine.

It turned out that I had forgotten to sign the assembly with the functoid, so the script I have to deploy a new functoid failed when adding the assembly to the GAC, which I didn’t notice, since the script runs so fast I never see the result :-)

But really.. why can’t an error like that contain the name of the file that cannot be found?

--
eliasen

Hi all

I just did a post on developing a custom cumulative functoid. You can find it here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2010/01/13/DevelopingACustomCumulativeFunctoid.aspx

At the very end of the post I write that you should NEVER develop a custom referenced cumulative functoid but instead develop a custom inline cumulative functoid. Given the title of this blog post, probably by now you know why this is :-)

When I developed my first cumulative functoid, I developed a referenced functoid, since this is what I prefer. I tested it on an input and it worked fine. Then I deployed it and threw 1023 copies of the same message through BizTalk at the same time. My test solution had two very simple schemas:

Source schema.

Destination schema.

The field “Field1” in the source schema has a maxOccurs = unbounded and the field “Field1” in the destination schema has maxOccurs = 1.

I then created a simple map between them:

The map merely utilizes my “Cumulative Comma” functoid (Yes, I know the screen shot is of another functoid. Sorry about that… :-) ) to get all occurrences of “Field1” in the source schema concatenated into one value separated by commas that is output to the “Field1” node in the output.

My 1023 test instanced all have 10 instances of the “Field1” in the input, so all output XML should have these ten values in a comma separated list in the “Field1” element in the output schema.

Basically, what I found was, that it was quite unpredictable what the outcome of that was. Some of the output XML has a completely empty “Field1” element. Others had perhaps 42 values in their comma separated list. About 42% of the output files had the right number of fields in the comma separated list, but I don’t really trust they are the right values…

Anyway, I looked at my code, and looked again… couldn’t see anything wrong. So I thought I’d try with the cumulative functoids that ship with BizTalk. I replaced my functoid with the built-in “Cumulative Concatenate” functoid and did the same test. The output was just fine – nothing wrong. This baffled me a bit, but then I discovered that the cumulative functoids that ship with BizTalk are actually developed so they can be used as BOTH referenced functoids and inline functoids. Which one is used depends on the value of the “Script Type Precedence” property on the map. By default, inline C# has priority, so the built-in “Cumulative Concatenate” functoid wasn’t used as a referenced functoid as my own functoid was. I changed the property to have “External Assembly” as first priority and checked the generated XSLT to make sure that now it was using the functoid as a referenced functoid. It was. So I deployed and tested… and guess what?

I got the same totally unpredictable output as I did with my own functoid!

So the conclusion is simple; The cumulative functoids that ship with BizTalk are NOT thread safe, when used as referenced functoids. As a matter of fact, I claim that it is impossible to write a thread safe referenced cumulative functoid, for reasons I will now explain.

When using a referenced cumulative functoid, the generated XSLT looks something like this:

               1:
              <
              xsl:template
              match
              ="/s0:InputRoot"
              >
            

               2:
              <
              ns0:OutputRoot
              >
            

               3:
              <
              xsl:variable
              name
              ="var:v1"
              select
              ="ScriptNS0:InitCumulativeConcat(0)"
              />
            

               4:
              <
              xsl:for-each
              select
              ="/s0:InputRoot/Field1"
              >
            

               5:
              <
              xsl:variable
              name
              ="var:v2"
              select
              ="ScriptNS0:AddToCumulativeConcat(0,string(./text()),"
              1000
              ")"
              />
            

               6:
              </
              xsl:for-each
              >
            

               7:
              <
              xsl:variable
              name
              ="var:v3"
              select
              ="ScriptNS0:GetCumulativeConcat(0)"
              />
            

               8:
              <
              Field1
              >
            

               9:
              <
              xsl:value-of
              select
              ="$var:v3"
              />
            

               10:
              </
              Field1
              >
            

               11:
              </
              ns0:OutputRoot
              >
            

               12:
              </
              xsl:template
              >
            

As you can see, the “InitCumulativeConcat” is called once, then “AddToCumulativeConcat is called for each occurrence of “Field1” and finally “GetCumulativeConcat” is called and the value is inserted into the “Field1” node of the output.

In order to make sure the functoid can distinguish between instances of the functoid, there is an “index” parameter to all three methods, which the documentation states is unique for that instance. The issue here is, that this is only true for instances within the same map and not across all instances of the map. As you can see in the XSLT, a value of “0” is used for the index parameter. If the functoid was used twice in the same map, a value of “1” would be hardcoded in the map for the second usage of the functoid and so on.

But if the map runs 1000 times simultaneously, they will all send a value of “0” to the functoids methods. And since the functoid is not instantiated for each map, but rather the same object is used across all the maps, there will a whole lot of method calls with the value “0” for the index parameter without the functoid having a clue as to which instance of the map is calling it, basically mixing everything up good.

The reason it works for inline functoids is, of course, that there is no object to be shared across map instances – it’s all inline for each map… so here the index parameter is actually unique and things work.

And the reason I cannot find anyone on the internet having described this before me (This issue must have been there since BizTalk 2004) is probably that the default behavior of maps is to use the inline functionality if present, then probably no one has ever changed that property at the same time as having used a cumulative functoid under high load.

What is really funny is, that the only example of developing a custom cumulative functoid I have found online is at MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561338(BTS.10).aspx and the example is actually a custom referenced cumulative functoid… which doesn’t work, because it isn’t thread safe. Funny, eh?

So, to sum up:

Never ever develop a custom cumulative referenced functoid – use the inline versions instead. I will have o update the one at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com right away :)

Good night…

--
eliasen

Hi all

As many of you know, I am currently writing a book alongside some of the best of the community. Currently I am writing about developing functoids, and in doing this I have discovered that there are plenty of blog posts and helpful articles out there about developing functoids, but hardly any of them deal with developing cumulative functoids. So I thought the world might end soon if this wasn’t rectified. :-)

Developing functoids really isn’t as hard as it might seem. As I have explained numerous times, I consider creating a good icon as the most difficult part of it :—)

When developing custom functoids, you need to choose between developing a referenced functoid or an inline functoid. The difference is that a referenced functoid is a normal .NET assembly that is GAC’ed and called from the map at runtime requiring it to be deployed on all BizTalk Servers that have a map that use the functoid. Inline functoids on the other hand output a string containing the method and this method is put inside the XSLT and called from there.

There are ups and downs to both – my preference usually goes towards the referenced functoid… not because of the reasons mentioned on MSDN, but simply because I can’t be bothered creating a method that outputs a string that is a method. It just looks ugly :)

So, in this blog post I will develop a custom cumulative functoid that generates a comma delimited string based on a reoccurring node as input.

First, the functionality that is needed for both referenced and inline functoids

All functoids must inherit from the BaseFunctoid class which is found in the Microsoft.BizTalk.BaseFunctoids namespace which is usually found in <InstallationFolder>\Developer Tools\Microsoft.BizTalk.BaseFunctoids.dll.

Usually a custom functoid consists of:

• A constructor that does almost all the work and setting up the functoid
• The method that should be called at runtime for a referenced functoid or a method that returns a string with a method for inline functoids.
• Resources for name, tooltip, description and icon

A custom cumulative functoid consists of the same but also has a data structure to keep aggregated values in and it has two methods more to specify. The reason a cumulative functoid has three methods instead of one is that the first is called to initialize the data structure, the second is called once for every occurrence of the input node and the third is called to retrieve the aggregated value.

To exemplify, I have created two very simple schemas:

Source schema.

Destination schema.

The field “Field1” in the source schema has a maxOccurs = unbounded and the field “Field1” in the destination schema has maxOccurs = 1.

I have then created a simple map between them:

The map merely utilizes the built-in “Cumulative Concatenate” functoid to get all occurrences of “Field1” in the source schema concatenated into one value that is output to the “Field1” node in the output.

The generated XSLT looks something like this:

               1:
              <
              xsl:template
              match
              ="/s0:InputRoot"
              >
            

               2:
              <
              ns0:OutputRoot
              >
            

               3:
              <
              xsl:variable
              name
              ="var:v1"
              select
              ="ScriptNS0:InitCumulativeConcat(0)"
              />
            

               4:
              <
              xsl:for-each
              select
              ="/s0:InputRoot/Field1"
              >
            

               5:
              <
              xsl:variable
              name
              ="var:v2"
              select
              ="ScriptNS0:AddToCumulativeConcat(0,string(./text()),"
              1000
              ")"
              />
            

               6:
              </
              xsl:for-each
              >
            

               7:
              <
              xsl:variable
              name
              ="var:v3"
              select
              ="ScriptNS0:GetCumulativeConcat(0)"
              />
            

               8:
              <
              Field1
              >
            

               9:
              <
              xsl:value-of
              select
              ="$var:v3"
              />
            

               10:
              </
              Field1
              >
            

               11:
              </
              ns0:OutputRoot
              >
            

               12:
              </
              xsl:template
              >
            

As you can see, the “InitCumulativeConcat” is called once, then “AddToCumulativeConcat is called for each occurrence of “Field1” and finally “GetCumulativeConcat” is called and the value is inserted into the “Field1” node of the output.

So, back to the code needed for all functoids. It is basically the same as normal functoids:

               1:
              public
              class CummulativeComma
: BaseFunctoid

               2: {

               3:
              public CummulativeComma()
: base()

               4: {

               5:
              this.ID
= 7356;

               6:  

               7: SetupResourceAssembly(GetType().Namespace
+ "." + NameOfResourceFile, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());

               8:  

               9: SetName("Str_CummulativeComma_Name");

               10: SetTooltip("Str_CummulativeComma_Tooltip");

               11: SetDescription("Str_CummulativeComma_Description");

               12: SetBitmap("Bmp_CummulativeComma_Icon");

               13:  

               14:
              this.SetMinParams(1);

               15:
              this.SetMaxParams(1);

               16:  

               17:
              this.Category
= FunctoidCategory.Cumulative;

               18:
              this.OutputConnectionType
= ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord;

               19:  

               20: AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);

               21: }

               22: }

Basically, you need to:

• Set the ID of the functoid to a unique value that is greater than 6000. Values smaller than 6000 are reserved for BizTalks own functoids.
• Call SetupResourceAssembly to let the base class know what resource file to get resources from
• Call SetName, SetTooltip, SetDescription and SetBitmap to let the base class get the appropriate resources from the resource file. Remember to add the appropriate resources to the resource file.
• Call SetMinParams and SetMaxParams to determine how many parameters the functoid can have. They should be set to 1 and 2 respectively. The first is for the reoccurring node and the second is a scoping input.
• Set the category of the functoid to “Cumulative”
• Determine both the type of nodes/functoids the functoid can get input from and what it can output to.

I won’t describe these any more right now. They are explained in more details in the book :) And also, there are plenty of posts out there about these emthods and properties.

Now for the functionality needed for a referenced functoid:

Beside what you have seen above, for a referenced functoid, the three methods must be written and referenced. This is done like this:

               1: SetExternalFunctionName(GetType().Assembly.FullName,
GetType().FullName, "InitializeValue");

               2: SetExternalFunctionName2("AddValue");

               3: SetExternalFunctionName3("RetrieveFinalValue");

The above code must be in the constructor along with the rest. Now, all that is left is to write the code for those three methods, which can look something like this:

               1:
              private Hashtable
myCumulativeArray = new Hashtable();

               2:  

               3:
              public
              string InitializeValue(int index)

               4: {

               5: myCumulativeArray[index]
= "";

               6:
              return
              "";

               7: }

               8:  

               9:
              public
              string AddValue(int index, stringvalue, string scope)

               10: {

               11:
              string str
= myCumulativeArray[index].ToString();

               12: str
+= value + ",";

               13: myCumulativeArray[index]
= str;

               14:
              return
              "";

               15: }

               16:  

               17:
              public
              string RetrieveFinalValue(int index)

               18: {

               19:
              string str
= myCumulativeArray[index].ToString();

               20:
              if (str.Length
> 0)

               21:
              return str.Substring(0,
str.Length - 1);

               22:
              else
            

               23:
              return
              "";

               24: }

So, as you can see, a data structure (in this case a Hashtable) is declared to store the aggregated results and all three methods have an index parameter that is used to know how to index the data structure for each method call in case the functoid is used multiple times at the same time. The mapper will generate a unique index to be used.

Compile the project, copy the DLL to “<InstallationFolder>\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions” and GAC the assembly and you are good to go. Just reset the toolbox to load the functoid.

Now for the functionality needed for an inline functoid:

The idea behind a cumulative inline functoid is the same as for a cumulative referenced functoid. You still need to specify three methods to use. For an inline functoid you need to generate the methods that will be included in the XSLT, though.

For the constructor, add the following lines of code:

               1: SetScriptGlobalBuffer(ScriptType.CSharp,
GetGlobalScript());

               2: SetScriptBuffer(ScriptType.CSharp,
GetInitScript(), 0);

               3: SetScriptBuffer(ScriptType.CSharp,
GetAggScript(), 1);

               4: SetScriptBuffer(ScriptType.CSharp,
GetFinalValueScript(), 2);

The first method call sets a script that will be global for the map. In this script you should initialize the needed data structure.

The second method call sets up the script that will initialize the data structure for a given instance of the functoid.

The third method call sets up the script that will add a value to the aggregated value in the data structure.

The fourth method call sets up the script that is used to retrieve the aggregated value.

As you can see, the second, third and fourth line all call the same method. The last parameter is used to let the functoid know if it is the initialization, aggregating or retrieving method that is being setup.

So, what is left is to implement these four methods. The code for this can look quite ugly, since you need to build a string and output it, but it goes something like this:

               1:
              private
              string GetFinalValueScript()

               2: {

               3: StringBuilder
sb = new StringBuilder();

               4: sb.Append("\npublic
string RetrieveFinalValue(int index)\n");

               5: sb.Append("{\n");

               6: sb.Append("\tstring
str = myCumulativeArray[index].ToString();");

               7: sb.Append("\tif
(str.Length > 0)\n");

               8: sb.Append("\t\treturn
str.Substring(0, str.Length - 1);\n");

               9: sb.Append("\telse\n");

               10: sb.Append("\t\treturn
\"\";\n");

               11: sb.Append("}\n");

               12:
              return sb.ToString();

               13: }

               14:  

               15:
              private
              string GetAggScript()

               16: {

               17: StringBuilder
sb = new StringBuilder();

               18: sb.Append("\npublic
string AddValue(int index, string value, string scope)\n");

               19: sb.Append("{\n");

               20: sb.Append("\tstring
str = myCumulativeArray[index].ToString();");

               21: sb.Append("\tstr
+= value + \",\";\n");

               22: sb.Append("\tmyCumulativeArray[index]
= str;\n");

               23: sb.Append("\treturn
\"\";\n");

               24: sb.Append("}\n");

               25:
              return sb.ToString();

               26: }

               27:  

               28:
              private
              string GetInitScript()

               29: {

               30: StringBuilder
sb = new StringBuilder();

               31: sb.Append("\npublic
string InitializeValue(int index)\n");

               32: sb.Append("{\n");

               33: sb.Append("\tmyCumulativeArray[index]
= \"\";\n");

               34: sb.Append("\treturn
\"\";\n");

               35: sb.Append("}\n");

               36:
              return sb.ToString();

               37: }

               38:  

               39:
              private
              string GetGlobalScript()

               40: {

               41:
              return
              "private
Hashtable myCumulativeArray = new Hashtable();";

               42: }

I suppose, by now you get why I prefer referenced functoids? :-) You need to write the method anyway in order to check that it compiles. Wrapping it in methods that output the strings is just plain ugly.

Conclusion

As you can hopefully see, developing a cumulative functoids really isn’t that much harder than developing a normal functoid. Just a couple more methods. I did mention that I usually prefer the referenced functoids because of the uglyness of creating inline functoids. For cumulative functoids, however, you should NEVER use referenced functoids but instead only use inline functoids. The reason for this is quite good, actually – and you can see it in my next blog post which will come in a day or two.

Thanks

--
eliasen

Hi all

I just threw my blog through http://typealyzer.com to see what type my blog is, and it turns out my blog is an “ESTP - The Doers”. Description of that:

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

The graph show is this one:

I am not going to comment on the accuracy of this description other than well… pretty accurate :-)

What blog type is your blog?

--
eliasen

Hi all

I had a discussion with Randal van Splunteren (http://biztalkmessages.vansplunteren.net/) today about demotion. Randal has been so kind as to review the first chapter I am writing for the book (http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/09/18/BizTalkServer2009Unleashed.aspx) and we started chatting about demotion. Specifically we discussed whether existing values in XML would be overwritten when demotion occurs.

As it turns out, it depends.

I did a small sample with two schemas and a map. I used a receive port to receive a message, mapped it to the second schema (which just created empty nodes in the destination schema) and output the result through a send port. The receive location used XMLReceive and the send port used the XMLTransmit pipeline. What happened was, that the output had the correct demoted values in them, since the XML assembler had empty elements to map into. Now, if I changed the map to put a value into the fields, then the mapped values were also output and not the demoted values. This means, that demotion does NOT overwrite existing values.

Randal, however, had a sample, where the existing values WERE overwritten. His solution was leveraging an orchestration, however, which seems to be the big difference. As I have blogged about here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/10/16/DemotionDoesNotWorkForAttributesOrDoesIt.aspx orchestrations can demote into attributes, which normal demotion cannot. So apparently there is another difference, which is, that demotion in an orchestration, actually overwrites existing values.

But now for the funny (weird?) part. I setup a solution where I had an XML instance as input and used the passthrough receive pipeline. So no message type was promoted. Even without an orchestration, the XML assembler actually does demotion, which is cool. BUT, it overwrites existing values… Go figure. If the message type is present, existing values are not overwritten, but if it is not present, existing values are overwritten.

Weird!

--
Eliasen

Hi all

The other day I was given the task of updating an InfoPath template part that was in use on a laptop, because a newer version of this template part was available.

Upon opening the InfoPath client, I saw this:

There were two template parts, and in this case they are named “TemplateGroup1” and “TemplateGroup2”. I had a new version for the “TemplateGroup1” template part. I clicked on “Add or Remove Custom Controls” and got this screen:

As you can see, the “TemplateGroup1” does not show up, which I thought was weird. So, I tried clicking on “Add” to just add the new version of the “TemplateGroup1”, but that gave me this error:

The custom control, <TemplateGroup1> (urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:templategroup1:-myxsd-2009-11-22t19-43-32), is already installed. Remove the existing custom control, and then try installing again.

So, I was at a loss… I couldn’t remove the existing version, and I couldn’t upload a new version.

Finally, I discovered what had happened. The user has an entry in the registry like this:

The key “IPCustomControlsFolder” is placed in the “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\InfoPath\Designer” path of the registry. All template parts you put into this folder are automatically added to the controls of InfoPath.

So I found that path, and deleted the “TemplateGroup1” template part, and everything was fine.

So, what I now know is, that there are two ways of adding new template parts to be used by InfoPath:

1. Add them manually inside the InfoPath client (or the toolbox in VS.NET)
2. Add the right registry key to the registry, so you have a repository of template parts. This is especially useful for a repository on a shared network folder that can be used for all employees.

So if you ever have trouble removing a template parts from the custom controls section, look for the registry key.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I KNOW it is old, but I have just today finally taken the time to listen to an interview on Channel 9 with Sean O’Driscoll, who is the general manager for community support and the MVP program. You can find it here.

Sean talks a lot about what the MVP program is, and I’d like to just take a couple of really important points from his talk and list here

1. The MVP award is a “Thank you” for your PAST efforts in the communities. There are NO expectations to an MVP about what to do the next 12 months or the next day, even.
2. The MVP award lasts 12 months. After that you will have to be reevaluated to see if your past 12 months of contributions to the community have been good enough to warrant a reaward.
3. A true MVP gets the award not because he wants the award but because he wants to help people. A true MVP would do exactly the same effort in communities even if there was no MVP award.

Especially the third point is important to me. I mean.. the first time I was awarded the MVP title, I got an email from MS stating that I had been nominated, and I had to go search on the internet to find out what the MVP award was, because I had NO idea…

Anyway, it’s a good video – go watch it! :)

Edit: Only 15 minutes after I posted it: Sean is no longer GM of community support. Toby Richards is that now. Big thanks to my very fast MVP lead Gerard Verbrugge for setting me straight! :)

--
eliasen

Hi all

Here at Logica in Denmark, we have just been told that we have been chose as the Danish Microsoft Partner of the year. We are naturally quite proud of this, and one of the reasons for choosing us is, that despite the financial crisis we have gained market shares.

You can read Microsofts press release (only in Danish, I am afraid) here: http://www.logica.dk/file/18133

--
eliasen

Hi all

Just a quick note to let you all know that my friend and colleague Jakob Lund Krarup has started a new blog about writing games using Microsofts XNA framework.

So if this interests you, do follow it :-)

Edit (2009-11-04): The link to the blog is http://www.xnafan.net – which I seem to have missed just before…

--
eliasen

Hi all

Today I tried playing with the “Fixed” property that can be set on an element or an attribute in your schema. According to the documentation, this is then a value that MUST be present in the element.

So the mapper is actually quite down with this – you cannot map anything to the field that has a value in the “Fixed” property. And when expecting the XSLT that is generated by the mapper you will find, that the mapper simply inserts the correct and hard coded value into the field.

Great.

Now, I created some links in the map just to test it, and chose that the mapper should validate the input for my map, but not the output, since I hadn’t bothered dragging all the necessary links.

To my surprise I got this error:

             1: Output validation error: The value
of the 'MiddleNames' element does not equal its fixed value.

An error validating the output of the map… but this surely must be a mistake, because I turned validation of the output from the map off and besides; the value in “MiddleNames” cannot be wrong, because the mapper has put it there it self, taken from the schema. Very weird indeed.

Only after quite a search, did I discover that the error was in validation of the INPUT to the map and not the output. I had used the same schema as both input and output, and my input instance did not have the correct value since it was an old test instance.

But really… Microsoft… that error message could be better! :-)

Hope this helps someone.

--
eliasen

Hi all

As many have noticed, I am co-authoring a book and right now I am writing all my stuff in Word 2007.

As you might have guessed, I have lots of sections, subsections, figures, tables and other numbered items in my text, and naturally, they are there because I need to reference them in my text.

In order to insert a cross reference from some text to a given numbered item, I found two options:

1. Go to the “References” tab and click on “Cross-reference” in the “Captions” section.
2. Go to the “Insert” tab and click on “Cross-reference” in the “Links” section.

Both will give me this window:

This is all very fine, but I need a quicker access point, since it appears that I most often need both clicks to get to the dialog box, since I am usually not on either the “Insert” or the “References” tab.

So I discovered the “Quick Access Toolbar” by chance. This happened when I accidentally right-clicked on the “Cross-reference” in stead of clicking on it. Here I could add the functionality to the “Quick Access Toolbar” and also choose to show the “Quick Access Toolbar”, as seen here:

The arrow points to the “Quick Access Toolbar” and the red square is around the “Cross-reference” functionality. So now I always only need one click, which made me happy… for a while :-)

Because once I could do it with just one click, I started wondering about a keyboard shortcut for it. I couldn’t find one, and I searched and searched… and finally just after posting my question to a newsgroup, I found how to do it:

Go to “Word Options”, which is a button at the lower right when clicking on the Start button at the upper left of Word:

This will open up the Word Options. Go to “Customize” and click on “Customize…” as seen in the image below:

After this you get a screen where you can change short cuts, as seen here:

Choose “Insert Tab” and then “InsertCrossReference” and click in the “Press new shortcut key:” box. Now enter the shortcut you want (I entered Alt+Ctrl+Shift+C). Word will tell you if the shortcut you have chosen is all ready assigned to another function (Mine is “Unassigned” as you can see) and then you can click on “Assign” to complete the task.

So now, every time I need to insert a cross reference, I just pres Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C and the dialog box comes up.

All that is left now is to get the “Only Label and number” as the default value for the drop down that decides what to insert instead of “Entire Caption”, but a Word MVP wrote in a post I found that this was not possible. Bummer. Keeping my fingers crossed for Office 2010! :-)

I hope this helps someone.

--
eliasen

Hi all

If you are also receiving this error when unit testing your schemas:

TOMTreeGenerator.GetElementAbsoluteType: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

then I can inform you that the reason is, that the built-in unit test framework does not support schemas that include or import other schemas.

To partially overcome this, take a look at the seventh issue of the BizTalk Hotrod at http://biztalkhotrod.com/default.aspx, where it is explained how to write a small helper class that will allow you to do unit testing on schemas that include and/or import other schemas.

Unfortunately this does not cover native file formats, but one can hope that Microsoft will improve the unit testing features in future versions of BizTalk.

Hi all

My apologies for writing something that is only relevant for the Danish audience.

Anyway, my friend and former colleague Jesper Petersen and his wife, Helle Petersen have started a new web site at http://www.delebarn.dk. The web site is a tool for parents that are divorced and need a some way of communicating about their children. There are lots of features that a free and you can buy a VIP membership quite cheap.

The site is only in Danish.

So if you are divorced and need some way of handling information about your children, like; How did it go at the doctor? When is football practice? And lots, lots and lots other stuff, then take a look at http://www.delebarn.dk.

Thanks

--
eliasen

Hi all

The other day I ran into a strange error when compiling my BizTalk solution. It was a simple solution, which I was fairly sure there was nothing wrong with. I had two projects. In the first I had a public orchestration and in the second I had a schema and an orchestration that calls the orchestration in the first project.

So the project structure looks like this:

So not something that would normally go wrong. Anyway, the “customer.biztalk.sendmail” project compiles just fine. But when I compile the “eliasen.customer.test” project it fails with these three errors:

1. identifier 'biztalk' does not exist in 'eliasen.customer'; are you missing an assembly reference?
2. cannot find symbol 'customer.biztalk.sendmail.Send_Receipt'
3. 'biztalk.sendmail.Send_Receipt': can only call or exec a service

This was weird. Apparently the called orchestration (customer.biztalk.sendmail.Send_Receipt) could not be found. Now since there has been a lot of issues with the copy local functionality being broken, that was my first thought. But since my solution had never been deployed and using Reflector on the customer.biztalk.sendmail assembly that was copied to the bin folder of the eliasen.customer.test project had all the right classes, I skipped that idea.

Then, just to be sure, I checked that “biztalk”, “customer” and “sendmail” aren’t reserved words in XLANG/s here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa547020(BTS.10).aspx – they weren’t.

Then I googled the “can only call or exec a service” error and found a couple of hits, but none that I could directly relate to my issue.

Then, as if struck by divine intervention, I thought of changing the namespace of the orchestration that was being called. Maybe in hindsight it makes sense, since one of the errors is telling me that it is looking for “biztalk” in the “eliasen.customer” namespace, which really doesn’t make sense at all.

Anyway, I opened up the properties of the called orchestration and changed the namespace:

and then it compiled… after re-choosing the called orchestration in my “Call Orchestration” shape. This, of course, is not acceptable – I want to be able to have any namespace I want. It seems that somehow the compiler matches the “customer” in “customer.biztalk.sendmail” to the “customer” in “eliasen.customer.test” with each other.

I have tried looking deeper into this, but I can’t seem to find the exact reason it is failing, so I will probably just report it to Microsoft and then let them deal with it :-)

Hope this helps someone…

--
eliasen

Hi all

Today I discovered something I was not expecting while documenting something else, which I have just described here.

I had a solution that involved this input schema:

and this output schema:

Field1 from the input schema and Field3 form the output schema are promoted to the same property and Field2 form the input schema and Field4 from the output schema are also promoted to the same property. Note, that Field4 is an attribute, whereas Field1, Field2 and Field3 are elements.

I then have a map that does not map anything from the input to the output. It just creates empty elements/attributes in the output schema.

I added a receive port and receive location to read in the input and used the XMLReceive pipeline, because I needed the messagetype and I needed the property promotion. I added my map to the receive port. I then created a send port that basically just took everything that came in on the receive port and sent it out to a file. The send port uses the XMLTransmit pipeline.

The output from this was, as I expected. Given this input:

I got this output:

What happens is, that demotion is not supported for attributes, which really seems like a silly restriction, but that is just how it is.

When, however, I implemented my solution using an orchestration, it worked! The value of Field2 in the input was demoted into the value of Field4 in the output.

My orchestration is very simple:

Basically, I receive the input, transform it using the same map as was on the receive port, copy over all the properties:

               1: OutputMessage(*)
= InputMessage(*);

               2: OutputMessage(DemotionTest.Property1)
= InputMessage(DemotionTest.Property1);

               3: OutputMessage(DemotionTest.Property2)
= InputMessage(DemotionTest.Property2);

The reason that I copy over Property1 and Property2 manually is, that they are marked as MessageDataContextProperty in the property schema, and therefore, they are not automatically copied over using the OutputMessage(*) = InputMessage(*) statement.

After doing this, I just send out the message. The result is this:

Now, this confused me… and what confused me more is, that I can actually do it with the passthrough pipeline on the send port. This means, that the demotion is happening as the orchestration publishes the message into the MessageBox for sending out the message.

So the upside to this is, that demotion for attributes DOES work – but only when the demotion occurs inside an orchestration upon sending out the message.

The downside is, that the product team have managed to do things differently depending on where in the process it happens, which really sounds like bad design. Hopefully they will fix this at some point in time.

Hope this helps someone

--
eliasen

Hi all

It is pretty common that developers want to assign one message to another inside and orchestration. And as we all know, this must happen inside a “Construct Message” shape.

Inside the “Construct Message” shape, you can have several shapes, but they must all be either a “Transform” shape or a “Message Assignment” shape. The “Transform” shape is used to execute a map, that will generate the message(s) that is/are to be constructed. The “Message Assignment” shape on the other hand uses the expression editor to let you specify how to assign a value to the message(s) that is/are to be constructed.

Often, there is a need to basically copy a message and then change just a couple of values in the copied message. This can’t be done by changing the values of the existing message, as messages in an orchestration are immutable.

Creating the copy is pretty simple; You just assign one message to another like this:

               1: OutputMessage
= InputMessage;

Now, what many people realize after doing this and something does not work, like routing, correlation or other is, that this assignment only copies the content of InputMessage to OutputMessage. The context is not copied at all. So what you can do is to add another line of code to your “Message Assignment” shape like this:

               1: OutputMessage
= InputMessage;

               2: OutputMessage(*)
= InputMessage(*);

This will copy the context of a message from one message to another… but not the entire context, as it turns out.

I was trying out a demo for property demotion, and for this I let my orchestration receive an input message, transform it to an output message and send this out.

So what I did was that I created two schemas:

and

I let Field1 and Field3 be promoted into the same promoted property from a custom property schema, and I let Field2 and Field 4 be promoted into another property in a custom property schema.

and a map that does not map anything – it just created empty fields for Field3 and Field4.

In my “Construct Message” shape, I then added a “Transform” shape to do the transformation and a “Message Assignment” shape that would copy the properties. I then wanted to make sure the output of the send port had the demoted values inside it.

What I expected to happen was this:

1. The XMLReceive pipeline would receive the input, promote the two properties and publish the message to the MessageBox.
2. The Orchestration would pick it up, perform the transformation, copy the context and send the message out.
3. The XMLTransmit pipeline would demote the two values from context (that I had copied from the input message) into Field3 and Field4

This didn’t happen, though. No values were demoted at all. Now, not demoting into Field4 was expected, since demotion doesn’t work for attributes (or does it? See my blog post coming up in a very short time :-) ), but I really expected something to turn up in Field3.

It turns out, that this statement from my code:

               1: OutputMessage(*)
= InputMessage(*);

does not copy ALL the context, but only the promoted properties that are marked as MessageContextPropertyBase. The ones that are marked as MessageDataPropertyBase (which is the default) do not get copied over. Now, this actually makes sense, all though it baffled me at first, since properties marked as MessageDataPropertyBase are based on values inside the message, so they cannot just be copied to another message type, since BizTalk cannot guarantee that this property exists on this message type and that the element that points to the promoted property actually exists in the message. Well, I guess BizTalk COULD guarantee that, but Microsoft have chosen not to implement that.

Also, distinguished fields, which are also in the context of the message are not copied over – again, this makes sense, since these are tightly bound to the schema they come from (This doesn’t stop the mapping engine of copying them over in maps on receive ports, though, which is really silly – see here).

SO, in order to get ALL the context copied form my input schema to the output schema, I needed three lines of code:

               1: OutputMessage(*)
= InputMessage(*);

               2: OutputMessage(DemotionTest.Property1)
= InputMessage(DemotionTest.Property1);

               3: OutputMessage(DemotionTest.Property2)
= InputMessage(DemotionTest.Property2);

or I could mark the properties as MessageContextPropertyBase.

Yes, indeed… So remember this from now on:

1. Assigning one message to another does NOT copy over the context
2. Copying over context using M2(*) = M1(*) does NOT copy over custom properties that are marked as the default (MessageDataContextBase)
3. In order to get the rest of the properties copied over, do it manually or change the type of the properties, if applicable.

I hope this helps someone…

--
eliasen

Hi all

When developing BizTalk 2009 solutions using Visual Studio .NET 2008 on Windows Server 2008, you run into issues when deploying from within Visual Studio .NET.

Now, first of all, as long as there are issues with BizTalk 2009 on Visual Studio .NET 2008, you should refrain from deploying from within Visual Studio .NET.

Secondly, when deploying on Windows Server 2008, you might run into this series of errors:

First error:

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)), followed by

Second error:

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Gac.Fusion.IAssemblyCache.InstallAssembly(AssemblyCacheInstallFlag flags, String manifestFilePath, FusionInstallReference referenceData)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Gac.Gac.InstallAssembly(String assemblyPathname, Boolean force)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.GacInstall(String assemblyLocation)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.PrivateDeploy(String server, String database, String assemblyPathname, String applicationName)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.Deploy(Boolean redeploy, String server, String database, String assemblyPathname, String group, String applicationName, ApplicationLog log)

Third error:

Unspecified exception: "
Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))"

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

Fourth error:

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

Fifth error:

Failed to add resource(s). Change requests failed for some resources. BizTalkAssemblyResourceManager failed to complete end type change request. Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

Now, usually, I must confess that my developer machines are usually virtual PCs, where I just login as the local administrator. If you do that, everything works fine. But in Windows Server 2008, Microsoft have introduced a new security system, where you need to approve it every time you start up some program that requires administrator rights – even if you are a member of the local administrators group.

So for instance, starting up BizTalk Server Administration console will cause this to appear:

And you have to click “Continue” to start it up.

The error above is because suddenly, even if you are a member of the local administrators group, you cannot add assemblies to the GAC.

You have three choices to fix it:

1. Login with your username, but run Visual Studio .NET as an administrator. This is done by right clicking on the short cut for VS.NET and choosing “Run as administrator”.
2. Login as administrator
3. Turn off the “User Account Control”. This is done by entering “Control Panel” => “User Accounts”. Click on “Turn User Account Control on or off” – and in here you can turn it off. Now, when logged in as a user that i not the administrator, but who is a member of the local administrators group, you get the rights you usually have.

Hope this helps someone

--
eliasen

Hi all

Just to let all you Danes know, Alan Smith (MVP) will be delivering the famous Quicklearn courses in BizTalk Deep Dive and BizTalk for Administrators in Copenhagen this fall.

You can see more about the courses at

BizTalk 2009 Developer Deep Dive – November 16’th

BizTalk 2009 for Administrators – November 30’th

Both courses are 5 days.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I just discovered a funny “feature” of the Bing Search on the Connect site:

So it is showing me results 1-0 of 0…

Funny, eh? No? Maybe? Oh, nevermind… :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, the other day I had this requirement for a BizTalk pipeline component:

Take an InfoPath formula and convert it into a PDF that is to be sent out via email. This seemed easy enough. I searched a bit, and found that three simple steps were needed:

1. Install this: 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF 
2. In my code, reference Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.dll and Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.FormControl.dll
3. Write these lines of code:

               1: FormControl
formControl = new FormControl();

               2: formControl.Open(pInMsg.Data);

               3:
              string output
= Path.GetTempFileName();

               4: formControl.XmlForm.CurrentView.Export(output,
Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.ExportFormat.Pdf);

Of course, this would also mean some code that would read the pdf file back in and then create the output message. But hey, that was just the price I had to pay.

BUT… I was being naive… As the more clever of my readers have probably all ready realized, if something is called FORMcontrol, then it is for programs that have a UI. The code crashed big time at runtime with some ActiveX exception :-(

Then I remembered that I have a colleague who had previously told me that she had done this at some point, so I emailed her for her code.

Unfortunately, her code involved taking the form, extracting the XSL from the XSN file, perform a transformation on the XML using the XSL which will generate HTML and then using some utility to convert this into PDF. This was more complex than I had hoped, but I saw no other way. Unfortunately, her code had this line in it:

               1: StreamReader
stream = new StreamReader(XmlFormView.XmlForm.Template.OpenFileFromPackage("View1.xsl"));

So, it seems that I will have to do a lot of dirty work myself :-(

This turned into quite a list of subtasks:

• Take the XML document that comes through the pipeline component
• Take the value of the processing instruction called “mso-infoPathSolution” This processing instruction is always present in an InfoPath form and it looks something like this:

  <?mso-infoPathSolution
  solutionVersion="1.0.0.2" productVersion="12.0.0" PIVersion="1.0.0.0"
  href="http://path.to/form.xsn" name="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:MyForm:-myXSD-2009-09-21T15-43-10" ?>

• Take the value of the href “attribute” that is in the value of the processing instruction. The href is a URI that points to the XSN that this XML is an instance of, you see.
• Get the XSN file that is located at the URI.
• Extract the XSL file that matches the view of the form you want to convert into PDF.
• Perform the transformation
• Convert into PDF

So I am now going from the few lines of code I was hoping for to a more complex solution… so lets look at the code:

First of all, I need the value of the processing instruction. This is easily done:

 1:privatestaticstring GetHrefFromXml(XmlDocument
infoPathForm)

 2: {

 3: XmlNode
piNode = infoPathForm.SelectSingleNode("/processing-instruction(\"mso-infoPathSolution\")");

 4:if (piNode
!= null && piNode is XmlProcessingInstruction)

 5: {

 6: var
pi = (XmlProcessingInstruction)piNode;

 7:string href
= pi.Value;

 8:int location
= href.IndexOf(Href);

 9:if (location
!= -1)

 10: {

 11: href
= href.Substring(location + Href.Length);

 12: href
= href.Substring(0, href.IndexOf("\""));

 13:return href;

 14: }

 15:thrownew ApplicationException("No
href attribute was found in the procesing instruction (mso-infoPathSolution). Without
this, the location of the form cannot be detected and without the form no PDF can
be generated.");

 16: }

 17:thrownew ApplicationException("Required
XML processing instruction (mso-infoPathSolution) not found. Without this, the location
of the form cannot be detected and without the form no PDF can be generated.");

 18: }

The most annoying part is, that the value of a processing instruction can be anything. In this case, it appears to be a list of attributes like “normal” XML, but since this is not guaranteed, there is no language support for getting the value of the href “attribute”. So I chose to use string manipulation to get the value.

After getting the href, I need to get the XSN file from SharePoint Server, where the form is published. This turned out to be a challenge also.

My first approach was quite simple:

 1:privatestaticbyte[]
GetFormByUrl(string href)

 2: {

 3: var
wc = new WebClient

 4: {

 5: Credentials
= CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials

 6: };

 7:return wc.DownloadData(href);

 8: }

This turned out to be something silly, though. What happens when SharePoint and Forms Server get a request for the XSN file, it assumes some one is trying to fill out the form. So what I got back was the HTML that the Forms Server was sending a user that wanted to fill out the form. Then I thought I’d try to do this:

 1:privatestaticbyte[]
GetFormByUrl(string href)

 2: {

 3: HttpWebRequest
wr = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(href);

 4: wr.AllowAutoRedirect
= false;

 5: WebResponse
resp = wr.GetResponse();

 6: Stream
stream = resp.GetResponseStream();

 7:using (MemoryStream
ms = new MemoryStream())

 8: {

 9:byte[]
buffer = newbyte[1024];

 10:int bytes
= 0;

 11:while ((bytes
= stream.Read(buffer,0, buffer.Length)) != -1)

 12: ms.Write(buffer,0,bytes);

 13:return ms.ToArray();

 14: }

 15: }

Basically, using an HttpWebRequest I could ask it to not redirect. This didn’t work either, since what I then got back was some HTML that basically just said that the page has moved. Bummer.

But then another colleague who apparently is better at searching than I am found out that I can add a noredirect parameter to my request that will instruct SharePoint to not redirect. This is different from my current approach because my current approach instructs .NET to not follow redirects, whereas this new approach instructs SharePoint to not ask me to redirect.

So I ended up with something as simple as this:

 1:privatestaticbyte[]
GetFormByUrl(string href)

 2: {

 3:string url
= href + "?noredirect=true";

 4: var
wc = new WebClient

 5: {

 6: Credentials
= CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials

 7: };

 8:return wc.DownloadData(url);

 9: }

Simple and beautiful :-)

Now I have the XSN file and the next issue pops up, naturally; How do I get the XSL extracted from the XSN file. The XSN file is just a cabinet file with another extension, so I thought this must be easy. I found out it is not. I searched and searched and ended up finding all sorts of weird stuff where people used p/invoke to do stuff and what not. I am confused that Microsoft have not added at least extraction functionality to the .NET framework, but they haven’t.

I ended up doing this:

 1:privatestaticstring ExtractCabFile(string cabFile)

 2: {

 3:string destDir
= CreateTmp(true, "");

 4:  

 5: var
sh = new Shell();

 6: Folder
fldr = sh.NameSpace(destDir);

 7:foreach (FolderItem
f in sh.NameSpace(cabFile).Items())

 8: fldr.CopyHere(f,
0);

 9:return destDir;

 10: }

This code assumes that the XSN file has been written to a temporary file with the extension .CAB – this is very important, since the shell command will open up the .CAB file with the default program, which is then the explorer. After that, all files in the cabinet file is copied to “destDir” which is just a directory created in the users Temp directory.

I am quite annoyed to have to go through all this, but that’s how things go sometimes.

So now I have found the href of the form, downloaded the form and extracted its files. Time for the transformation:

 1:privatestatic MemoryStream
PerformTransformation(XmlDocument xmldoc, string destDir, string view)

 2: {

 3: var
transform = new XslCompiledTransform();

 4: var
stream = new StreamReader(destDir + @"\"
+ view + ".xsl");

 5: XmlReader
xmlReader = XmlReader.Create(stream);

 6: transform.Load(xmlReader);

 7:  

 8: var
outputMemStream = new MemoryStream();

 9: transform.Transform(xmldoc, null,
outputMemStream);

 10: stream.Close();

 11: xmlReader.Close();

 12: outputMemStream.Seek(0,
SeekOrigin.Begin);

 13:return outputMemStream;

 14: }

So just a normal XSLT transformation, resulting in some HTML that is returned in a stream.

After this, I need to convert it into PDF, which is really simple using a tool we bought for this:

 1:privatestaticbyte[]
GetPdfFromHtml(Parameters param)

 2: {

 3: var
pdfConverter = new PdfConverter

 4: {

 5: LicenseKey
= "SomethingElse - You are not getting the correct
License Key :-)"

 6: };

 7:  

 8:byte[]
pdfBytes = pdfConverter.GetPdfBytesFromHtmlStream(param.HtmlStream, Encoding.UTF8,
param.DestDir.EndsWith(@"\") ? param.DestDir
: param.DestDir + @"\");

 9:return pdfBytes;

 10: }

We are using the ExpertPDF library for this. The third parameter for the GetPdfBytesFromHtmlStream method call is the directory where the cabinet file was extracted to, since this is where all images used in the form are also kept and they are needed for the PDF to include them.

All in all; the component now works, but it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had hoped.

As a last detail, I added a property to my pipeline component that the developer can use to decide which view to use for the transformation form XML to HTML.

The complete code for the pipeline component will not be available for download, since this was done for a customer, but I might do something a bit smaller and simpler and add it to my pipeline component collection later on.

--

eliasen

Hi all

It has arrived – the first service pack for BizTalk 2006 R2.

Get it here: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=65

For a list of fixes, see here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974563

New features, see here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee532481(BTS.20).aspx

Good luck with it.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Jon Skeet, who has been a C# MVP since 2003, as I understand it was to have his MVP renewed on October 1’st 2009, but his employer Google advised him not to be renewed, so he had to tell Microsoft to not consider him for renewal. You can see Jons blog entry here.

To be honest, I think it is very petty way Google is thinking.

So to Jon: Great work, keep it up, and hopefully either Google will come around or you will find a better job and get your MVP status back.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Now, I am aware that people following my blog are probably very likely to follow Richard Seroters blog as well, but just in case you haven’t noticed, Richard tortured me with his 4 questions this time :-)

You can find his questions and my answers here.

Now, being interviewed by Richard and thus having a link to my blog appear on his blog entry is bound to generate some traffic to my blog from people who either didn’t know me or didn’t visit my blog… So naturally, the first about 12 hour after Richard posted his interview, my blog was down because the webhosting company that hosts eliasen.dk had changed something… or something else, who knows? :-)

As you can see, though, my blog is again up and running and will hopefully stay this way! :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

I am REALLY excited to announce, that I will be co-authoring a book on BizTalk. I will be a part of a terrific team consisting of

• Anush Kumar
• Brian Loesgen
• Charles Young
• Jon Flanders
• Scot Colestock
• Tom Canter
• Me :-)

Together we will be writing “BizTalk Server 2009 Unleashed”, which is so new, that you cannot find it on the web page of the publisher or any other sites. It is so new, that we haven’t even signed our contracts with the publisher yet, which may cause someone to quit the project if they are not happy about the contract… so nothing promised yet.

But, needless to say, I am really excited, and giving the team, also feeling quite humble :-).

This will be my first book.

Wohooo

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, sorry to see it, but it appears it has been almost two months since my last blog post – hope to get back on track soon.

Since the last time, I have installed Windows 7 RTM on my laptop, and one of the reasons I haven’t blogged is, that I couldn’t get Windows Live Writer Backup to restore my backup of Windows Live Writer from my old Windows XP installation. That turned out to be a silly thing… For others; You cannot restore using WLW Backup without having run Windows Live Writer first. It isn’t enough to install it, it must have been run also. Oh well.

I hope to entertain you all some more from now on…

--
eliasen

Hi all

Some weeks ago, I had a customer that had an Order XML and needed to fetch all the names of the ordered items based on the item number that was in the XML.

He contacted me because the solution he had thought of didn’t work. What he did was that he mapped the Order XML to a SQL Adapter schema that called an SP in SQL Server to get the item name based on the item number. The issue he ran into was, that the SP got called multiple times – once for each item, and the SQL adapter didn’t seem to batch all the results into one result for his orchestration.

So, given this simplified Order:

<ns0:Order xmlns:ns0="http://MultipleCallsToSP.Order">
  <Header>
    <CustomerName>CustomerName_0</CustomerName>
    <OrderNumber>OrderNumber_0</OrderNumber>
  </Header>
  <OrderLines>
    <OrderLine>
      <ItemNumber>21</ItemNumber>
      <Quantity>42</Quantity>
    </OrderLine>
    <OrderLine>
      <ItemNumber>42</ItemNumber>
      <Quantity>21</Quantity>
    </OrderLine>
  </OrderLines>
</ns0:Order>

He mapped it to this XML:

<ns0:GetItemNameRequest xmlns:ns0="http://eliasen.dk">
  <ns0:GetItemName ItemID="21" />
  <ns0:GetItemName ItemID="42" /> 
</ns0:GetItemNameRequest>

This was then sent to SQL Server using the SQL Adapter to call a SP named “GetItemName” which just takes an ItemID (int) as parameter and returns the ItemName hat matches the ItemID.

Now, the schema that is generated for the SQL Server request actually doesn’t allow for multiple GetItemName elements to be created, but that is changeable :-) If you set it to have maxOcurs = unbounded, then it can occur multiple times, and what happens is that the SP is called multiple times. Unfortunately, only one of the ItemNames is returned – the rest is ignored.

So the customer came to me because naturally, he needed all the ItemNames and not just one of them. I have suggested 5 possible solutions, which I will describe here.

First option
Use the pattern described at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2006/11/05/LoopingAroundElementsOfAMessage.aspx to loop around the order lines and build the resulting XML one order line at a time.

Second option
Use enveloping in the receive location in order to get one orchestration started for each order line.

Third option
Use the Database Lookup functoid to retrieve the ItemName based on the ItemID

Fourth option
Generate a comma separated list of ItemID’s in the map, and let the stored procedure use that list to return the relevant ItemNames. This has some consequences for the stored procedure. Before it looked like this:

SELECT ItemNumber, ItemName
FROM Items
WHERE Items.ItemNumber = @ItemID
FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS

Now, it looks like this:

SELECT ItemNumber, ItemName
FROM Items
WHERE EXISTS (select * from dbo.Split(‘,’,@items) where [Items].ItemNumber = ID)
FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS

@items is the parameter for the SP, which is just an nvarchar that is to contain the comma separated list.

For this to work you need the Split function, which looks like this:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Split] (@sep char(1), @s varchar(512))
RETURNS table
AS
RETURN
(    
                WITH Pieces(pn, start, stop) AS (
                      SELECT 1, 1, CHARINDEX(@sep, @s)
                      UNION ALL      
                      SELECT pn + 1, stop + 1, CHARINDEX(@sep, @s, stop + 1)      
                      FROM Pieces      
                      WHERE stop > 0    
                 )
                 SELECT pn, CONVERT(int, SUBSTRING(@s, start, CASE WHEN stop > 0 THEN stop-start ELSE 512 END)) AS ID
FROM Pieces
)

In order to generate the comma separated list in your map, I have written two blog posts about this issue, which you can find at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/06/22/HandlingCommaSeparatedValuesInsideAMapPartI.aspx and http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/06/27/HandlingCommaSeparatedValuesInsideAMapPartII.aspx

Fifth option
The fifth and last option i want to mention is, that with the new SQL Server LOB adapter from Adapter Pack 2.0, it appears that you can do it like the customer wanted to do it in the first place with sending one XML to SQL Server and getting an accumulated response back from SQL Server based on several calls to a stored procedure. I haven’t had time to test this, but look out for another blog post about this :-)

Hope this helps someone.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Just to let you know, I am now listed on http://www.biztalkblogs.com along with lots of other cool BizTalk bloggers :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have just released version 5 of my pipeline components library.

It has the following additions:

• SuspendAfterMap. In BizTalk 2009 (which is the only supported BizTalk version for this pipeline component) there has been added support for recoverable interchanges for errors occurring during mapping on receive ports after disassembling. This is achieved by setting a specific promoted property to “true”. I have created a pipeline component that will do this for you.
• WriteProperties. This pipeline component serves almost NO purpose at all, except I used it for debugging to see what properties existed on a message going through BizTalk. It will write out all context of a message to the eventlog, one event at a time.

It has the following new features:

• Promote. The pipeline component used for promoting a value based on an XPath expression and thereby enabling you to promote a specific instance of a reoccurring element has been enhanced by a “constant”. So instead of having to set the value of some property to the result of an XPath expression you can just enter a constant instead. If you enter both a constant and an XPath expression the constant wins. This new feature is quite handy if you need to set the value of for instance MIME.FileName to a specific value or any other property for that matter.

You can find the newest versions at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have just released version 9.1 of my functoid library. Actually, nothing much new has appeared. I had accidentally left out the functoid I described at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/03/08/SolvingTheIfThenElseProblemInAMapPartIII.aspx from version 9, so now it is reintroduced – and it has also been added to the documentation.

Find the newest version of the functoids library at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com – thanks.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have been running into too many issues with BizTalk 2009 on VS.NET 2008 lately. This post is just to mention them and let everyone else know that they are not the only one – and that they will be reported to MS and hopefully fixed quickly.

Build action of schemas
Some times the “build action” of a schema in your BizTalk project is set to “None” instead of “BtsCompile”. When this happens, the schema is not compiled into the assembly and can therefore not be used for pipeline components, maps, orchestration messages, and so on. It happens if you drag a schema from your explorer into your project, but it also happens sometimes when you drag a schema between two projects inside VS.NET.

More build action of schemas
The above error could be more easy to live with, if it weren’t absolutely impossible to know when the “Build action” property of the schema in visible in VS.NET – some times the property is visible and you can change the value. Other times it is not. Quite confusing. I have found that if I add a schema to a project, then the property is suddenly visible for all schemas in the project. Change the ones that need changing and delete the schema you added.

Auto save a map before schemas are chosen
When you add a new map then at some point VS.NET auto saves the map, but if this happens before you have chosen both the source and destination schema you suddenly get an error, which you really do not expect, because you weren’t doing anything at the time of the error. This also occurred in previous versions of BizTalk.

Map looses information about schemas
I have seen several times, that even after choosing source- and destination schema for a map and dragging a couple of links in the map and saving it, then at compile time, I get an error about the map not having source- and destination schemas. So I need to choose them again, and redo all the links, because they have magically disappeared. This happens for maps that uses both schemas from the same project as schemas from referenced projects.

Output window
The output window seems to not always show all information when compiling/deploying. Some times the information comes all at the end instead of being written to the output windows as it happens. Other times, I can rebuild my entire solution and the output windows will only show me the one warning that occurred during compilation.

Dragging elements in Schema Editor
Dragging elements inside the schema editor has had me baffled since BizTalk 2002. Some times, I need more than 20 tries to get an element to be dragged – and sometimes it just works. Annoying? Indeed it is!

Copy local fails
If I have a project (P2) that references another project (P1), then after I have added an item to P1 and recompiled it, everything seems OK. BUT, if I then deploy from within V.NET, things start to go wrong. From then on, it seems that the “Copy local” property of the project reference is ignored. Whenever I recompile P2, I do NOT get the P1.dll copied to the local folder of P2. This causes all sorts of stuff as also explained here by Ryan: http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/17/biztalk-2009-amp-visual-studio-2008-annoyance-2.aspx

Setting properties for more than one project at the same time
See here: http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/15/biztalk-2009-feature-missing.aspx for Ryans thoughts on this.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Microsoft have finally released some pricing information about Azure. Find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx

--
eliasen

Hi all

I did a follow up to my old post about how to loop around the elements of a message a couple of days ago.

As you can se from the comments to my followup, Thiago mentions that there isn’t any performance hit because everything is done inside an atomic scope. Now, Thiago is naturally correct when he states, that no persistence occurs inside an atomic scope. But as you can also see from the comments, I wondered about what to do about using a request-response port – so I just had to test it.

For BizTalk 2009, just as the previous versions, you CAN’T have both the send shape and corresponding receive shape used for a request-response port in the same atomic scope. At compile time you will get this error: “an atomic scope may not contain or call a service or scope that contains both the send and the corresponding receive of a requestresponse operation on a 'uses' port or servicelink”.

This may seem odd at first glance, but it is due to the fact, that in order to make sure the ACID properties are respected at runtime the orchestration engine submits messages that are sent out to the messagebox, but it doesn’t release them for the messagebox to route until the atomic scope has finished. This way, if an error occurs inside the atomic scope, no messages have actually been sent, and therefore, BizTalk can guarantee a consistent state.

So basically, if the message isn’t released until AFTER the atomic scope, then there is no way you can receive the reply inside the same atomic scope. Makes sense.

SO, if you want to loop around elements in a message by calling a receive pipeline inside your orchestration, you can’t use request-response ports, as you can with other patterns. Sorry, but that is the way it is.

Conclusion:
If you want to loop around elements inside an orhestration, use a receive pipeline if possible since this is done in an atomic scope and therefore no persistence points occur. If not possible, use the pattern described here.

Thanks, Thiago for pointing out that my post needed some more details…

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eliasen

Hi all

Today I faced a very peculiar problem. I was helping a customer split a BizTalk project into two projects, because some of the schemas that were in the original project needed to be common for other projects.

So this is what i started out with:

which is: Two schemas and a map between them.

And this is what I would like:

So basically, the common schema has been transferred to a common project. Now, naturally, I need to reference the CommonProject from the OriginalProject and then reload the schema in my map to make it work. But this is where the weird part starts. After compiling the NewCommonProject and adding the reference, this is what showed up in the schema browser when I wanted to reload the schema in the map:

Basically, my new project didn’t have any schemas inside it. After much troubleshooting, thinking that the issue was something with the newly compiled dll didn’t get copied to the bin folder of the OriginalProject and trying lots of stuff with that, I finally figured it out.

I just happened to notice that the file size of the NewCommonProject.dll was only 5kb which seemed to small. So I browsed the dll in the object browser and it was totally empty. Weird. Then I went and looked at the properties of the schema, and didn’t see anything unusual. So I added a new schema to the project just to see what would happen with that. This new schema showed up in the schema browser. Even weirder. But then I went and looked at the properties of the schemas again and that’s when this new property suddenly showed up:

I changed the build action on the schemas to be “BtsCompile” and this did the trick. Now all the schemas showed up in the schema browser.

Now, another strange side to this story is, that by now, the Build Action property has disappeared again… I haven’t quite figured out when it appears and when it does not.

BUT, if you ever run into issues where your schemas just don’t show up anywhere… this might be your issue.

Hope this helps someone.

--
eliasen

Hi all

2 and a half year ago, I wrote a blog post about looping around elements, which can be found here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2006/11/05/LoopingAroundElementsOfAMessage.aspx. In this post, I mention two ways to do something per element in a message. One is to use the XML (or flat file) disassembler to split the message into lots of messages and have them handled individually, and the other is to do it inside an orchestration.

Since then, BizTalk has been updated such that you can now call a receive pipeline from within your orchestration, which gives you the another way of looping through elements inside an orchestration.

Often times, in the forums, users are suggested to loop through elements of a message inside an orchestration. It is a fairly common approach if you want the subelements of a message handled in the correct order, for instance.

This post is to make sure people know that looping around a message inside an orchestration can have a serious performance impact.

Say you receive a large message – 100MB. You start looping around it inside an orchestration and split it up into, say, 1000 messages of 100k each. Then, for each message you call a web service or send out the message to some system. What will happen is, that the orchestration will persist its state after each send shape, meaning that the 100BM is written 1000 times to the messagebox. Persistence points are something you always need to be aware of when designing your orchestrations, and with messages of 100MB, even more so.

SO, don’t just loop around a message inside an orchestration because you can… do it when you absolutely have to.

Thanks

--
eliasen

Hi all

Upon reading a forum post today, I stopped to think about the usage of custom XSLT to completely replace the mapper, custom scripting functoids and the built-in functoids.

Some people can’t be bothered using the mapper and go straight to custom xslt whenever a mapping is to be created. Others use the built-in functoids whenever possible. And the rest go for some path in the middle, with functoids and the occasional scripting functoid whenever the built-in functoids either can’t get the job done or seem to be too troublesome to use.

The advantages of custom XSLT

1. Performance. It seems rather obvious that automatically generated XSLT can’t perform as well as custom XSLT. So if you really need high performance, use your own XSLT.
2. Maintainability. I will be using this argument against custom XSLT as well :-) but in essence, some people think that having a map with perhaps 200 functoids is too difficult to maintain. Sometimes you need lots of functoids in order to complete some mapping task that can be easily done in XSLT. In that case, the XSLT can be more readable and hence maintainable than using functoids.

The advantages of using the built-in functoids

1. Overview. Using the functoids can give a developer an overview of what functionality a map provides, whereas custom xslt needs to be gone through and “parsed” by a developer before he can understand what is happening.
2. Maintainability. (See, there it is again – in the opposite direction). A BizTalk developer knows about maps and functoids. He does snot necessarily know about xslt – and even if he does, he is not guaranteed to very proficient in it. By staying with the functoids you give a BizTalk developer the best possible opportunity to understand a new map he is going to maintain.

The advantages of using functoids and the scripting functoids

1. Everything is possible :-). Basically you can do what you want. Use built-in functoids as much as you prefer and throw in scripting functoids if you think the solution either can’t be done with the built-in functoids or is too troublesome to do.

My preference

Well, those that read my blog regularly wont be surprised when I say that my preference is to use the built-in functoids whenever possible. I turn to XSLT only when I cannot solve my problem with the built-in functoids. And when I need XSLT, I always use custom scripting functoids to supplement the other functoids, so I let as much of the job as possible be handles by built-in functoids. I never use custom XSLT to replace the map. My main reasons for this are:

1. Maintainability. I truly believe that it is easier for a new BizTalk developer to troubleshoot and/or change an existing map if only built-in functoids are used.
2. Overview. If a BizTalk developer opens up a map and sees lots of scripting functoids, he needs to open them all up and examine the code inside it in order to know what the map does. And after looking at 5 different scripting functoids, he needs to go back and look at the first again. Really annoying!

If I am doing a rally complex map where the number of custom scripting functoids is larger than the number of built-in functoids, I might consider using a custom XSLT script… but this haven’t happened yet :-) And also, if i run into really serious performance issues, I will consider it as well, off course.

Just my thoughts.

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eliasen

Hi all

When trying to help the guy I wrote about in http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/07/07/DistinguishedFieldNotWorking.aspx getting his distinguished field working, another guy suggested that he just used he xpath function instead of trying to get the distinguished field working. Now, he actually ended up using the xpath function because he had a reserved word in the xpath statement to the field he needed to access the field, but I thought I’d just write a post about why the xpath function should be avoided and perhaps generalize the post to the usage of promoted properties, distinguished fields and the xpath function. When to use what and why…

Why use distinguished fields over the xpath function

1. Readability. Inside an expression shape, it is much easier for a BizTalk developer to look at “Message.MyElement.MyField” than it is to look at “xpath(Message, “string(/*[local-name()=’MyElement’ and namespace-uri()=’http://mynamespace.com/something/somethingmore’]/*[local-name()=’Myfield’ and namespace-uri()=’’])”)”
2. Maintainability. If you need to change a schema at some point, the distinguished field is automatically updated to correspond to the new xpath expression that points to the relevant field (if you are using the BizTalk Editor, that is). If you use the xpath function, you need to find ALL occurrences of the xpath function in your entire solution that has an xpath expression that needs to be updated.
3. Performance. If you use the xpath expression to get values form a message, then the entire message needs to be loaded from the database and the xpath expression is then evaluated. Distinguished fields, on the other hand, are kept in the context of the message and is therefore loaded quickly at runtime.

Why use promoted properties over distinguished fields

1. Routing. Only promoted properties can be used for routing in the internal publish/subscribe engine if you need to route based on the content of a message.
2. Correlation. If you need to correlate a received message into a specific instance of your orchestrations, then you need to do this using promoted properties, as these are the only properties that can be added to a correlation type. This makes sense when you think of it, because correlation is really just runtime routing - setting up the correct subscriptions at runtime that will make the message hit the correct orchestration instance. And routing can only be done with promoted properties, hence these are needed for correlation.
3. Tracking. You cannot track distinguished fields – for tracking, you need promoted properties.

Why use the xpath function

1. Distinguished fields cannot be used because there is a reserved word in the path of the xpath expression
2. Distinguished fields cannot be used because you need to set or read a value from a reoccurring element

Why use distinguished fields over promoted properties

1. Performance. You want to keep the number of promoted properties as low as possible, since the messaging engine really needs as few promoted properties as possible to evaluate when finding out which subscriptions match an incoming message that is published to the MessageBox.

So, to sum up: Use distinguished fields whenever possible, switching only to xpath function or promoted properties if really needed.

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eliasen

Hi all

A guy on the forums posted a very small schema, in which he had promoted an element as a distinguished field.

His schema was this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16" ?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:b="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <xsd:element name="outbound_task">
    <xsd:annotation>
      <xsd:appinfo>
        <properties xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003">
          <property distinguished="true" xpath="/*[local-name()='outbound_task' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='task' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='task_id' and namespace-uri()='']" />
        </properties>
      </xsd:appinfo>
    </xsd:annotation>
    <xsd:complexType>
      <xsd:sequence>
        <xsd:element name="task">
          <xsd:complexType>
            <xsd:sequence>
              <xsd:element minOccurs="0" name="task_id" type="xsd:decimal" />
            </xsd:sequence>
          </xsd:complexType>
        </xsd:element>
      </xsd:sequence>
    </xsd:complexType>
  </xsd:element>
</xsd:schema>

His issue was, that when he tried using the distinguished field in an orchestration, the task_id field just didn’t show up in intellisense. And if he just entered the complete value in the expression shape (like this: Message.task.task_id) then he got a compile time error.

I messed around with it a lot, trying all sorts of stuff, but ended up with a quite simple solution: the word “task” is a reserved word. For a complete list of the reserved words, take a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa547020.aspx. So, basically, renaming the “task” element to “Task” or something completely different (but still avoiding any reserved words) will work.

Hope this helps.

--
eliasen

Hi all

A long time ago, I had a post about the toolbox in Visual Studio keeping old functoids on it and crashing and stuff.

The post can be found here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2006/12/05/RemovingFunctoidFromToolbox.aspx (Note the comments).

With this post I just wanted all to know that the path to the toolbox* file that should be deleted on a Windows Server 2008 with visual Studio 2008 is C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0

Hope it helps

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eliasen

Hi all

So, yesterday I had to loop through all properties on a message inside a pipeline component.

When you program a general pipeline component, you get an Execute method that looks like this:

public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pContext, IBaseMessage pInMsg)

Now, in order to loop through the properties, the common solution is like this (and you can find this in many many blog posts around the great internet):

for (int i = 0; i <= pInMsg.CountProperties; i++)
{
  string name;
  string ns;
  object value = pInMsg.Context.ReadAt(i, out name, out ns);
  // Do something with the vale, name and namespace
}

Now, this is quite all right as it is, but there is one small pitfall that I don’t think most people realize; The CountProperties property is a uint, meaning that it can contain values up to 2^32 = 4294967296. Unfortunately, the first parameter to the ReadAt method is an int, which only holds values up to (2^31) – 1 = 2147483647. So, if there are, say 3000000000 properties, then the CountProperties property will return the correct number of properties, but there is no way of calling the ReadAt method to get the property.

This is kind of silly.

Now, to be fair, I think that the most properties I have seen on a message ever may have been around 40-50 properties. So there is a looooong way to 2 billion properties :-) So in real life, I don’t expect anyone to run into this limitation – if you do, I’ll buy you a beer! :-)

BUT, just to be sure, what you should do to be absolutely correct in your code is this:

uint counter = pInMsg.CountProperties;
string name;
string ns;
if (counter > int.MaxValue)
{
  counter = int.MaxValue;
}
for (int i = 0; i < counter; i++)
{
  object value = pInMsg.Context.ReadAt(i, out name, out ns);
  // Do something with the vale, name and namespace
}

And then, off course, you should somehow notify someone that there were more properties than you could handle – like a Debug statement, an error in the eventlog or the such… perhaps even throw an exception BEFORE trying to enumerate the properties, sine it would be useless, the result you get.

Anyway… hope this is somehow a help to someone… not sure how, though :-)

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eliasen

Hi all

During my years on the forums, I have seen plenty, plenty and plenty more posts about the SQL Server Adapter schema generator closing unexpectedly, without any errors or any artifacts created.

Today I ran into it myself for the very first time with a BizTalk 2009 installation. I did some searching and found this post: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917847 – which only applies to BizTalk 2004 and BizTalk 2006.

This blog post is just to let everyone know that it applies to BizTalk 2009 as well.

Good luck out there…

--
eliasen

Hi all.

So, I am very proud to be able to publish that I have been awarded the MVP title again as of July 1’st. This, naturally is a great honor and I am rally happy about it.

Not sure I am as happy about it as Randal van Splunteren, though – because he promised some weeks ago, that if I didn’t get reawarded he would eat his shorts, shoes, hat or something – can’t remember which one, but it is in my log! :-)

The MVP title has lots of advantages, naturally – the title, the prestige, the gifts, the monthly webcasts and what not, but mainly I am happy that I do not have to bother removing the MVP logo from my blog, web site, business cards, et cetera .-)

Anyway, this is my third MVP title – going for the fourth in a year! :-)

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eliasen

Hi all

A friend and colleague of mine has just release SolZip version 1.1 on CodePlex – Find it here: http://solzip.codeplex.com/.

Basically, it is a nifty way of zipping a Visual Studio 2008 C# solution. The utility is pointed towards the .sln file and then zips all files in the solution and projects into one zip file.

To me this is really nice, because as of BizTalk 2009, the project files are just specialized C# projects and therefore, it seems to work just fine for BizTalk 2009 solutions as well. I can use it when blogging to quickly zip up a solution to attach to a blog post without having to zip the entire folder and then deleting the large dll files and other silly stuff. SolZip just takes what is necessary.

I was the very first downloader of the 1.1 version – you should go download it now! :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

Recently, I posted a post about handling mapping to and from a comma separated list. You can find it at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/06/22/HandlingCommaSeparatedValuesInsideAMapPartI.aspx

I came to think that this was actually also a great opportunity for me to develop my first cumulative functoid. The functoid is then supposed to take the values as input and output the list of values with a comma in between them.

The functoid has been developed and added to my functoid library at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com – free to download. Also another functoid in the library, which has been there for a while is the “CSV Extract” functoid which extracts a specific position from a separated list.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Some times people need to convert a list of elements into a comma separated list of values. In the forums this questions arises every now and then, so here goes a solution.

Suppose this input:

<ns0:MultipleElementsRoot xmlns:ns0="http://MapCommaSeparatedValue.MultipleElementsSchema">
  <MyField>Jan</MyField>
  <MyField>Eliasen</MyField>
  <MyField>BizTalk</MyField>
</ns0:MultipleElementsRoot>

And I want this output:

<ns0:CommaSeparatedRoot xmlns:ns0="http://MapCommaSeparatedValue.CommaSeparatedSchema">
  <CommaField>Jan,Eliasen,BizTalk</CommaField>
</ns0:CommaSeparatedRoot>

Inside a map I would handle it like this (2 approached, that share the first two functoids):

The reoccurring element is used as input to a string concatenate functoid. The functoid takes a comma as the second input. The output of the concatenate functoid is then used as input for a cumulative concatenate functoid, effectively creating a comma separated list of values. The issue with this list is, that it will have a comma at the end of the line, which needs to be removed.

One way of doing this is to use three functoids to pull this last comma away. First, I take the length of the string, then I subtract one from that, and use the string extract functoid to extract the string beginning at position 1 and ending at (length - 1) and send that to the destination element. Works like a charm.

Now, plenty of people out there (Henrik, you know who you are) would have no moral qualms using a C# scripting functoid to get rid of the extra comma. Like this:

public string RemoveLastComma(string input)
{
  return input.Substring(0, input.Length-1);
}

That one scripting functoid would eliminate the last three functoids I added to remove the last comma. But I still prefer the functoid way of doing it, mostly for maintenance reasons. A new BizTalk developer looking at a map with lots of scripting functoids has no idea what is happening, and even after looking at the code in all the scripting functoids, he can’t remember what is happening in more than a couple of them. In my opinion; Always use the built-in functoids if possible.

Now, just for the kick, I thought that some times the opposite could be the case – going from a comma separated list to lots of elements. This, I cannot solve using built-in functoids, unfortunately, so the map ended up like this:

Just one scripting functoid. The type is an “Inline XSLT Call Template” and the script is:

<xsl:template name="MyXsltSplitTemplate">
  <xsl:param name="param1" />
  <xsl:if test="$param1 != ''">
    <xsl:element name="MyField">
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="contains($param1, ',')">
          <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($param1, ',')" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          <xsl:value-of select="$param1" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:element>
    <xsl:call-template name="MyXsltSplitTemplate">
      <xsl:with-param name="param1" select="substring-after($param1, ',')" />
    </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

Basically, the function substring-before is used to get any string before a comma and output it. If no comma is in the string, the string is output. The string to the right of a comma is then used as a recursive call to the same template. Again; Works like a charm :-)

So, with any luck, this question can be answered by googling soon instead of asking in the forums :-)

Edit on 27’th June:

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eliasen

Hi all

I have received numeral questions from people getting a compile time error when compiling an orchestration that assigns a distinguished field of type xs:integer to a variable of type int32. Without looking into anything, you would expect this would work.

So lets say that we have a schema like this:

with this XSD:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<xs:schema xmlns:b="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003" xmlns="http://IntegerDecimal.InputSchema" targetNamespace="http://IntegerDecimal.InputSchema" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <xs:element name="InputRoot">
    <xs:annotation>
      <xs:appinfo>
        <b:properties>
          <b:property distinguished="true" xpath="/*[local-name()='InputRoot' and namespace-uri()='http://IntegerDecimal.InputSchema']/*[local-name()='MyInteger' and namespace-uri()='']" />
        </b:properties>
      </xs:appinfo>
    </xs:annotation>
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element name="MyInteger" type="xs:integer" />
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>
</xs:schema>

As you can see, it is a simple schema and the “MyInteger” field is of type xs:integer and it is marked as a distinguished field.

In my orchestration, I have a variable of type int32 called “MyInt” and in an expression shape I do this:

MyInt = InputMessage.MyInteger;

and it fails, which is quite surprising at first glance. At compile time I just get this: "The expression that you have entered is not valid.". That doesn’t help, so looking at my expression shape and reading the mouse over on the error in the expression shape I get this: “cannot implicitly convert type ‘System.Decimal’ to ‘System.Int32’”. Changing the line in the expression shape to this:

MyInt = System.Convert.ToInt32(InputMessage.MyInteger);

will make it work, because now you are explicitly casting the value to an integer.

The first times I saw this error, I thought that the compiler had an error, because I thought I was assigning an integer the value of another integer. It turns out, though, that I wasn’t really – only sort of…

If you look here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#integer you can see that the xs:integer type is actually a decimal type restricted to whole numbers. So the compiler actually thinks the field is a decimal and not an integer.

This is kind of silly, since the data type IS restricted to whole numbers. The actual error should be that the xs:integer can contain the number 4567234987623409763546387623476149823497862354845 which really is way to large for an int variable in an orchestration.

Anyway, the way to handle this is, naturally, to avoid the xs:integer type if possible and use the xs:int (or variants of this) instead. Sometimes it is needed, though, and in that case you just need to declare your variables of a type that will be able to contain all the possible values you receive. This can be an Int16 sometimes, if the people who have created the schema just didn’t know what the xs:integer type is. Sometimes the values received will be too large even for an Int64 variable, then consider using a decimal, a string or some other data type.

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, the other day, a guy asked a question on the online forums, and another guy tried helping out by stating, among other things, that the maps on receive ports are executed before the receive pipeline. This isn’t true, and I posted a post, where I tried to explain how things work. This ended up being slightly wrong, so I posted a correction, but now it seems I need to post another correction… and I ended up writing this post to explain how stuff works.

First of all, let me set one thing straight; When a message arrives on a receive location it is first sent through the receive pipeline that is specified on the receive location. This is needed before the map for several reasons, including converting the input to XML and promoting the MessageType, so the receive port can choose the correct map to execute. The receive pipeline also promotes all the distinguished fields and promoted properties that are specified on the schema.

Now, after the map has finished executing, the transformation engine will look up the schema for the output and it will instantiate the XMLDisassembler with this particular schema, so the disassembler doesn’t have to find the correct schema itself. After instantiating it, it will call it, so the XMLDisassembler will read the output from the map and promote all distinguished fields and promoted properties to the context of the message. Also, before doing the promotion, it will copy all the context from the original message, so you get all the properties from the adapter and so on copied to the destination message.

Now, there are a couple of issues to this, which most people don’t realize – mostly because they will only affect you on very very rare occasions:

Distinguished fields
I found that if you have an input message with a field marked as a distinguished field and then look at the context of the output from the map, then the output message also has the distinguished field from the input message in its context which really doesn't make sense, since you can't use it in any way. This has NO influence at runtime and NO influence at design time, so you will go through your life not realizing it. Also, usually we don’t set distinguished fields on the external schemas, because we don’t want to change them and because we don’t want to use schemas exposed to trading partners in our business processes, which is the only place we can use the distinguished fields.

Promoted Properties
If you have promoted a field from both input and destination schema to the same property, the value from input schema in the properties is overwritten by the value from the destination schema after the map. For the same reasons as for the distinguished fields, we rarely have promoted properties on the external schemas, and therefore you probably will never have an issue with this.

Envelopes
IF the schema for the destination message is marked as an envelope, the message will fail. This is because the disassembler will recognize the schema is an envelope and it will then debatch the message into several messages. Only the first is returned though, since the mapping engine which is calling the disassembler assumes this is not an envelope and therefore will only call the GetNext method once, whereas normally the GetNext emthod is called until it returns null. This first message is then looked at, but in the properties for the disassembler, the transformation engine has all ready set the only allowed schema, which was the envelope schema. So the disassembler only has the envelope schema as a possible schema, and the instance that comes out after debatching is not the output from the map anymore, meaning that it will fail with the standard error message “Details:"Document type "http://MyNameSpace.com#Record" does not match any of the given schemas."” As with the first to issues about distinguished fields and promoted properties, this should practically never happen, since you are most likely mapping the incoming message to some internal schema, for which there is usually no reason to mark as an envelope.

Conclusion
So, basically, when a message arrives, the receive pipeline is executed, then the map is executed and at the end, the XML disassembler is executed by the transformation engine to get all promoted fields in the destination message promoted. There are a couple of known issues with this, but they are either totally unimportant or very unlikely to occur.

I hope this helps someone out there.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Just a quick book review, since I have just read the “Who moved my Cheese” book.

It only takes like an hour to read, and it is the story of two mice and two people who are searching for cheese, where the cheese is a metaphor for something you really want to have. At some point, they run out of cheese, and the four characters take very different approaches to the changes in the environment. The point of the story is, naturally, that you can most likely identify yourself as one of the characters and after reading the book, perhaps you have learnt something about how you react to changes and how you should react – and hopefully improve your life.

Easily read with lots of points. Read it…

--
eliasen

Hi all

Just to let you all know, I have updated the documentation for my pipeline component library at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/ and the documentation for my functoid library at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com/

Happy reading :-)

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eliasen

Hi all

Saravana Kumar has launched version two of his great site http://www.biztalk247.com – it has loads of nice information about BizTalk, so go check it out.

Also, while you are checking it out, take a look at his other new site: http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/ which is collecting information from lots of blog entries about BizTalk.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Today I encountered something I have never seen before, when creating a map.

The issue occurs because my customer had a schema that imports two other schemas, both of which have an element called “metadata” – but naturally the two schemas have different target namespaces.

The main schema imports both, and has two records just below the root, and these two records reference each of the two metadata elements in the two imported schemas.

So the first schema could look like this:

And the second schema could look like this:

So both have an element named “metadata” but one is in the namespace “http://TwoElementsDifferentNamespace.MetadataOne” and the other is in the namespace “http://TwoElementsDifferentNamespace.MetadataTwo”.

After that, I create the schema that impors both:

As you can see it imports the first two schemas, and has to elements that reference each of the metadata elements form the two first schemas.

Also, I crated an output schema that just has three elements and then I created this map:

Pretty simple. Now, the issue comes when compiling, because I get this error:

Exception Caught: The map contains a reference to a schema node that is not valid.  Perhaps the schema has changed.  Try reloading the map in the BizTalk Mapper.  The XSD XPath of the node is: /*[local-name()='<Schema>']/*[local-name()='Root']/*[local-name()='metadata']/*[local-name()='Field2']

o the first try was to reload the schema – but that didn’t help – it just broke one of my links.

In he end I found out, that the issue is that the links are stored like this in the .BTM file:

<Link LinkID="1" LinkFrom="/*[local-name()='&lt;Schema&gt;']/*[local-name()='Root']/*[local-name()='metadata']/*[local-name()='Field1']" LinkTo="/*[local-name()='&lt;Schema&gt;']/*[local-name()='OutputRoot']/*[local-name()='Field1']" Label="" />

<Link LinkID="2" LinkFrom="/*[local-name()='&lt;Schema&gt;']/*[local-name()='Root']/*[local-name()='SomeFields']/*[local-name()='Field3']" LinkTo="/*[local-name()='&lt;Schema&gt;']/*[local-name()='OutputRoot']/*[local-name()='Field2']" Label="" />

<Link LinkID="3" LinkFrom="/*[local-name()='&lt;Schema&gt;']/*[local-name()='Root']/*[local-name()='metadata']/*[local-name()='Field2']" LinkTo="/*[local-name()='&lt;Schema&gt;']/*[local-name()='OutputRoot']/*[local-name()='Field3']" Label="" />

So. basically, the .BTM file saves links as XPath expressions WITHOUT the namespaces. So naturally, this has to go wrong, when there are two “metadata” elements on the same level in the schema.

The way to solve this is to choose the properties of the map and disable the “Ignore Namespaces for Links” like this:

After setting this property, the links change having namespaces inside the .BTM file and everything is just fine.

One might wonder why the namespaces are not enabled as the default, since they do make the solution more robust. Well, the reason is simple; If the namespaces are in all the links, and you change for instance the namespace of the root node, then ALL links in the map gets broken. So actually, not having the namespaces in the links make the solution more robust.

So… I hope this can help someone.

You can download the solution here:

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eliasen

Hi all

Just as i have started developing a functoid library (found at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com/) I have also started developing a pipeline component library. Right now it contains three components:

• DevNull. This pipeline component is quite simple. It will "swallow" everything that comes as input. This enables performance testing of stuff without concerns about adapter transport time at send port for instance.
• SearchAndReplace. This component will perform a search and replace on the incoming stream, replacing some string with some other string. Optionally, you can decide to let the input string be a regular expression and replace based on that instead of normal string search and replace.
• Promote. This component has three parameters, the name of a property, the namespace of the property and an XPath expression. The component will read in the value that corresponds to the XPath expression at runtime and promote it to the property given by the name and name space. This enables you to promote reoccurring elements.

You can find it at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/ – the url is weird, I know. But there is a limit to the length of the urls at codeplex, unfortunately.

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eliasen

Hi all

So, first I had a post about promoting reoccurring elements where I discussed 4 options for promoting an element that can occur multiple times in the input. Then I had a post about how you can pseudo do it in BizTalk 2000/2002.

This post is about two things:

1. Another way of doing it that doesn’t work
2. Writing the custom pipeline component that was my second suggestion in my first post.

First issue

As discussed in my first post, if you change the XPath of the promoted property in the schema (either by clicking the ellipsis as I wrote about or manually editing the XSD) to add the “[1]”, you get this compilation error:

Node "ElementWhereNumber1IsPromoted" - 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.

But, since I couldn’t get the “[1]” to work in BizTalk 2000/2002 when editing my second post I used the position function instead. So i started wondering if that might work in BizTalk 2006 R2. It doesn’t, though. It compiles just fine, and I really had my hopes up, but at runtime you get this 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:

So i had to drop that idea again.

Second issue

I decided to write the custom pipeline component that I discussed in my first post.

The main code is easy – just three properties:

1. Name of the property
2. Namespace of the property
3. XPath

You can download it at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/ where I have just made my initial release.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have had posts about the context accessor functoid here and here.

Just a couple of notes about the context accessor functoids (plural - because there are two functoids at codeplex):

• One of the functoids will only work when called from a map that is executed inside an orchestration.
• The other functoid will only work when called from a map in a receive port AND only if the pipeline component that ships with the functoid has been used in the receive pipeline.

As you can see, creating a map based on either of these functoids makes your map impossible to use in either an orchestration or a receive port based on which functoid you chose. So you are creating a pretty hard coupling between your map and where it should be used. This can be ok, but if other developers mess around with your solution in a year or so, they wont know that and things can start breaking up.

My self: I am a user of the functoids - I would use them instead of assigning values inside an orchestration using a message assignment shape.. but this discussion is pretty much academic and about religion :-)

Anyway, beware the limitations!

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eliasen

Hi all

I had a post about one of the context accessor functoids which can be seen here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/04/01/TheContextAccessorFunctoidPartI.aspx

This post is about the other one – the one that can only be used in a map that is used in a receive port.

Basically, the functoid takes in three inputs:

The first is the name of the property and the second parameter is the namespace of the property schema this property belongs to. The third parameter is an optional string that is returned in case the promoted property could not be read.

This functoid only works in a map that is called in a receive port and only if the receive location uses a pipeline that uses the ContextAccessorProvider pipeline component that is included in he same DLL as the functoids.

What the pipeline component does is, that it takes the context of the incoming message and saves it in a public static member. This way, the functoid can access this static member of the pipeline component and read the promoted properties this way.

Good luck using it.

--
eliasen

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

Hi all

Well, the time has once again come for a “If I had all the money in the world to pay to the BizTalk development team and I could decide what to put into the next version of BizTalk, this would be it”-list :-) There are a couple of items that I have stolen from http://blog.eliasen.dk/2007/10/06/BizTalkVNextWishlist.aspx.

1. Orchestration debugging should be easier. I really hate that I have to deploy my orchestration, throw a message through it just to get an instance in HAT that I an set breakpoints on and then have to throw another message trough the orchestration to debug it.
2. No more pipelines. Why no let the developer have an inline pipeline designer in a receive location and a send port? this way I don’t have to build custom pipelines – I can just chose pipeline components right on the receive locations and send ports.
3. For development purposes, it would be really nice to be able to right click a receive location that is disabled and choose "Execute". If for instance I have a SQL adapter receive location that is supposed to poll every minute, then I don't want to have to quickly disable the receive location once it has been fired. I want to keep it disabled, so data wont go through my system when I am not ready, and then just execute it whenever I am ready.
4. Restart Host Instances only once. Right now, if I deploy my solution from VS.NET, and this solution has 10 projects that are all set to "Restart Host Instances" on deployment, then the host instances will get restarted 10 times. Would be nice if VS.NET could figure this out and only do it once.
5. Specify the node that is body, when using enveloping and not just the parent. It makes great sense, that I can specify a node and all child elements are then submitted as separate messages from the receive pipeline. This is how we can receive orders, invoices, etc. in the same XML. BUT, if I receive XML where I only need the Orders, then I would like to point at the Orders element so that is all I get. Right now I have to use standard enveloping, and implement logic to just delete the invoices, etc. Not really nice, I think.
6. Better modeling tools for business processes. The last Gartners quadrant I saw on BMPS didn’t have Microsoft mentioned at all. Would be great with some formal cooperation with IDScheers Aris product or the like. Something like simulating your business process with different values in rules would be just great
7. Promoting via XPath. Please let me specify the XPath for some element that I want promoted in the disassembler components. If I know of an XPath that guarantees that only one value is in the result set og evaluating that XPath, then let me use it instead of forcing me to not promote anything that can occur multiple times. I am aware that with the current limitation, BizTalk is helping developers to not make mistakes, but hy not give us the opportunity and then suspend the message if the developer was wrong and multiple elements are in the resulting node list after evaluating the XPath expression?
8. It would be nice if we could expose a web service without having to require a parameter. If I want to expose an orchestration that builds an inventory XML hat customers can request, I really don’t need a parameter to do that. Some workaround would be nice.

--
eliasen

Hi all

Some may have noticed it – others will know it now :-)

BizTalk 2009 is available for download from MSDN.

the official BizTalk site doesn’t reflect the new version yet, though, so please have patience if you need the trial version or the likes.

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eliasen

Hi all

At http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/biztalkgeneral/thread/ecaa2059-d78e-449f-8eb0-37696847b4b0 there is a guy who is struggling to get the MessageID into a message inside a map.

I have been trying to help him and have come to a stand still, because I missed a very important point. The MessageID is “written” and not promoted to the context base. Therefore, it cannot be read using the functoid found at http://www.codeplex.com/ContextAccessor (The one used inside an orchestration).

So basically, you can use the functoid to get hold of all the properties that were promoted into the context, but the ones that were written, you need to get to some other way.

I have created a small sample that illustrates how to do this inside an orchestration.

Basically, I have a schema for the input:

It has two fields, and I have promoted the first field.

The output schema looks like this:

It has four fields.

What I want in the output is this:

• Field1: The value from Field1 in the source schema. It isn’t to be mapped directly, though. I want to demonstrate that the functoid can be used to get values that were promoted from a schema.
• Field2: The value from Field2 in the source schema. Mapped directly
• MessageID: The Message ID of he input message. Since this isn’t accessible by the functoid, I will use a Message Assignment shape to do that
• ReceivedFileName: Will contain the content of the BTS.ReceivedFileName poperty – by using the functoid.

The map looks like this:

I am using the ContextAccessor (for orchestations) to fill a value into Field1 and ReceivedFileName. I am mapping Field2 directly. The MessageID field I am not mapping, since I need a message assignment shape for that. The element “MessageID” must be present in the output, though. Otherwise i cannot fill in value. So, as you can see in the screenshot, I have set the “Value” property to “<empty>”. This will create an empty element. This feature is very handy for initializing elements that will later on get values from message assignment shapes but also for creating the needed empty fields for demotion.

Anyway, the parameters for the first functoid look like this:

The parameters are:

1. The name of the message to get the value from.
2. The name of the property
3. The name space of the property schema that property exists in.

The second functoid looks like this:

Now, the final touch is the orchestration:

Quite simple… A receive, a construct and a send port for the output. The construct shape has two shapes inside it. The first is a transformation shape hat will execute the map. The second is a message assignment shape hat will insert the messageid into the destination schema.

The message assignment shape looks like this:

I made the MessageID field of he output a distinguished field and can therefore insert values into it. This is quite clever . the way you can do several things to a message as long as you are still inside the same Construct Message shape. After the map, where I let the MessageID field be empty, I can insert a value into this field using a distinguished field. I could also just as easily have used XPath to do that, but that is not as readable, so I didn’t do it.

So… This was the first post of two – next time I will look at the receive port version of the Context Accessor functoid.

And one last point: If the idea i just to get an Id into a message and it doesn’t have to be the message ID of a message, you can also just use the “New GUID” functoid found at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com/

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eliasen

Hi all

Alister Whitford has a question today on the online forums about preserving white space in a map. He thought that the functionality has changed between BizTalk 2006 and BizTalk 2006 R2. He has done a great job looking into stuff and it appears he is right. You can check out he thread here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/biztalkgeneral/thread/7dd28a9b-16b5-4c0e-90db-843caf4689ee where he also shows how not to preserve white space in R2 and thus have the same functionality as in 2006 (non-R2).

Hope this helps someone

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eliasen

Hi all

Disclaimer: I do NOT encourage the usage of he information in this blog post. The post is merely about some silly experiment, he results thereof and a conclusion on it.

So, this friend of mine (and former colleague) mentions every now and then that he isn’t all that sure that the “No subscribers found” should be an error but maybe more a warning. His man argument is, that if I have two subscribers for something, say all incoming orders are put into an archive file drop and also sent to the ERP system, and the send port that sends to the ERP system is unenlisted, then no errors will occur in BizTalk, but from a business point of view, the system is definitely not working. So the fact that you don’t get the error that indicates something is wrong with routing is not actually very useful, because parts of the system may be down after all.

Anyway, we were discussing what to do about this in case you just don’t want that error to occur if no subscribers were found. We came up with two options:

1. Add a send port that uses Tomas Restrepos /dev/null adapter. you can find it at http://winterdom.com/dev/bts/index.html – look for “BizTalk 2006 R2 Null Send Adapter”. Using this adapter in the send port will cause everything going through the port to magically disappear.
2. Mostly for fun we came up with the idea to have an orchestration that only as one receive shape. This receive shape should receive a message of type System.Xml.XmlDocument – since this will let the orchestration receive any message types. Also, it would have to be a direct bound port, so the orhestration would get ALL messages that are published to the MessageBox, so we would never get the “No subscribers found” error. Now, naturally, this solution is extremely silly, since we would fire up an orchestration for all published messages. But we started thinking what the subscription would look like.

The rest of this post is to explore item 2 above to find out how the subscription would look like.

To do this, I created four scenarios – just to explain it to you.

The four scenarios are:

1. An orchestration that receives a message of type ReceiveSchema.xsd and is linked to a “Specify Later” port. This is the normal and widely used scenario.
2. An orchestration that receives a message of type System.Xml.XmlDocument from a “Specify Later” port. The common way of receiving binary files or any file without caring about what files they are.
3. An orchestration that receives a message of type ReceiveSchema.xsd and is linked to a direct bound port. This is the common way to receive ALL published orders, no matter what receive port or orchestration they were published from.
4. An orchestration that received a message of type System.Xml.XmlDocument and is linked to a direct bound port. This is not something I have ever seen used, but this is what I want to find out about :-)

So, to summon up the subscriptions:

Now then… As I wrote, it makes sense, but it wasn’t what I was expecting, actually. With this empty subscription, I STILL get the “No subscribers found” error when I pick up a message and publish it into the Message Box.

So instead of doing this, I started thinking about what else to do. So I created a receive port with a receive location and let a message go through it and get suspended. Looking at the details of the context of the message that was suspended I gor this:

So… I need a subscription that is not empty, but that will make sure my orchestration gets EVERYTING that is published into the MessageBox. This is done by setting the filter on he receive shape of my orchestration in scenario 4. The filter will have to include one of he above properties that is promoted. But looking at them I really don’t expect a message created inside an orchestration and then sent to the messagebox to have any of those properties set. So I decided to create a small orchestration that will simply just send a message to the messagebox. The context of the message published to the MesageBox looks like this:

As you can see, no overlap at all.

So, as I see it, a filter like “BTS.ReceivePortID exists OR BTS.Operation exists” should do the trick. Now, this subscription works in my small example, but I cannot guarantee it will work for all scenarios. I can’t think of an example right now where either the ReceivePortID or the Operation doesn’t exist, but there might be examples.

So… Basically, the whole idea about having an orchestration taking in ALL published messages to avoid errors about no subscribers is REALLY silly and should not be implemented. And if you choose to do it anyway, please remember that the above filter isn’t guaranteed to work in all scenarios… I was just playing around :-)

Not sure this will ever help anyone… but there goes :-)

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eliasen

Hi all

Someone at the online general BizTalk forum asked a question about combining two messages in a map. Now, he all ready knew about creating the map from inside an orchestration, but let me just quickly summon up for those not knowing this. If you have two messages inside an orchestration that you need to merge into one message in a map, what you do is that you drag a transformation shape into your orchestration like this:

In my example, I have a parallel convoy to get the two input messages into my orchestration. I then have two different ways of combining the two input messages into one output, and each is then output.

Anyway, after the transform shape is dragged onto the orchestration designer, you double-click on it to choose input and output messages like this:

You can add as many source messages as you want – I have chosen two messages. Make sure the checkbox at the bottom is selected. Then click “OK” and the mapper will open up. It will have created an input schema for you, which is basically a root node that wraps the selected source messages. At runtime, the orchestration engine will take your messages and wrap them to match this schema and use that as input for the map.

In my case, I have these two schemas:

and

My output schema looks like this:

The automatically generated map looks like this:

As you can see, the destination schema is just like my output schema, but the input schema wraps my two input schemas into one schema.

So… I have just briefly explained how two create the map that can combine two messages into one. Now for the functionality inside the map.

Most maps like this can be mapped like any other complex input schema. But sometimes you need to somehow merge elements inside the source messages into one element/record in the destination. This automatically becomes different, because the values will appear in different parts of the input tree.

The requirement that was expressed by the person asking the question in the online forum was that these two inputs:

and

and combine them into this:

So basically, there is a key that is needed to combine records in the two inputs. My schemas above are my own schemas that roughly look like the schema that was in use in the forum.

My first map that will solve the given problem looks like this:

Quite simple, actually. I use the looping functoid to create the right number of output elements, and I use the iteration and index functoids to get the corresponding values from the WayBill part of the source schema. The index funtoid can take a lot of inputs. In my case the path to the element is always the first until the vey last step, where I need to use the output of the iteration functoid. So I have only two inputs: The element that loops and the index of the parent of this element because that is the only place where I need to go to a specific element.

This works very nicely, but it has one serious drawback (and a minor one, which I will get back to later): It requires that the elements appear in the exact same order in both inputs. If this restriction can be proven valid, then this is my favorite solution, since I am a fan of using the built-in functoids over scripting functoids and custom XSLT if at all possible. I didn’t ask the person who had the issue if this restriction is valid, but thought I’d try another approach that will work around this just in case. This requires some XSLT, unfortunately, and the map looks like this:

Quite simple, really :-) The scripting functoid takes care of the job for me. It is an “Inline XSLT Call Template” functoid and the script goes like this:

<xsl:template name="BuildOutput">
<xsl:param name="ID" />
<xsl:element name="Output">
<xsl:element name="Number"><xsl:value-of select="$ID" /></xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="OriginPortId"><xsl:value-of select="/*[local-name()='Root' and namespace-uri()='http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/aggschema']/*[local-name()='InputMessagePart_0' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='HousebillRoot' and namespace-uri()='http://DualInput.DualSchemaHouseBillInput']/*[local-name()='HouseBillsNode' and namespace-uri()=''][HouseBillNo = $ID]/*[local-name()='OriginPortId' and namespace-uri()='']" /></xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="ShippingAddress"><xsl:value-of select="/*[local-name()='Root' and namespace-uri()='http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/aggschema']/*[local-name()='InputMessagePart_1' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='WayBillRoot' and namespace-uri()='http://DualInput.DualSchemaWayBillInput']/*[local-name()='WayBillInfo' and namespace-uri()=''][WayBillNo = $ID]/*[local-name()='ShippingAddress' and namespace-uri()='']" /></xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="ContainerAddress"><xsl:value-of select="/*[local-name()='Root' and namespace-uri()='http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/aggschema']/*[local-name()='InputMessagePart_1' and namespace-uri()='']/*[local-name()='WayBillRoot' and namespace-uri()='http://DualInput.DualSchemaWayBillInput']/*[local-name()='WayBillInfo' and namespace-uri()=''][WayBillNo = $ID]/*[local-name()='ContainerAddress' and namespace-uri()='']" /></xsl:element>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

Now this looks complex, but really it isn’t. Let me try to shorten it for you to be more readable:

<xsl:template name="BuildOutput">
<xsl:param name="ID" />
<xsl:element name="Output">
<xsl:element name="Number"><xsl:value-of select="$ID" /></xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="OriginPortId"><xsl:value-of select="XXX/*[local-name()='HouseBillsNode' and namespace-uri()=''][HouseBillNo = $ID]/*[local-name()='OriginPortId' and namespace-uri()='']" /></xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="ShippingAddress"><xsl:value-of select="YYY/*[local-name()='WayBillInfo' and namespace-uri()=''][WayBillNo = $ID]/*[local-name()='ShippingAddress' and namespace-uri()='']" /></xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="ContainerAddress"><xsl:value-of select="YYY/*[local-name()='WayBillInfo' and namespace-uri()=''][WayBillNo = $ID]/*[local-name()='ContainerAddress' and namespace-uri()='']" /></xsl:element>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

Here XXX is the XPath from the root node down to the HouseBillsNode node and YYY is the XPath from the root node down to the WayBillInfo node.

Basically, the script is fired by the map for each HouseBillNo element that appears (3 in my example) and the script will create an Output element with the HousebillNo value and i will then use the number to look up the values that correspond to the key in the other parts of the input.

There are some drawbacks to this solution as well, and I will just try to summon up the drawbacks here:

Drawbacks for first maps

1. If the elements do not appear in the exact same order in both inputs, the map will fail.

Drawbacks for the second map

1. The script has not been adjusted to handle optional fields. So it will create the output fields no matter if the input fields exist in the source.

Drawbacks for both maps

1. If the HouseBill input has more elements than the other, then the output will be missing values for the elements that would get there values form the second input.
2. If the HouseBill input has fewer elements than the other, then the output will simply not have records corresponding to these extra elements in the WayBill input.
3. Both scenarios can be handled in the XSLT, naturally, if needed.

There are probably other drawbacks – most of them related to the fact that I was too lazy to handle all exceptions that might occur. But you should get the idea anyway :-)

Hope this helps some one…

--
eliasen

Hi all

I decided that it was time to put my functoid library which was earlier hosted at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx to Codeplex.

You can find them along with the documentation at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com/ from now on.

Cheers

--
eliasen

Hi all

A couple of months ago, while trying to solve the If-Then-Else issue within a map in a nice way, a fellow BizTalk MVP suggested to me that I could just have the script inside a custom scripting functoid and then copy the script from custom scripting functoid to custom scripting functoid.

Naturally (as I assumed it was, back then) I told him that this was impossible, because BizTalk wouldn't let me have two custom scripting functoids which contains the same method, ie. the two methods have the same signature.

"Sure you can", he replied.... So I had to check it out... I fired up my BizTalk 2006 R2 virtual machine, and sure enough: He was right. I was in chock, because I was totally sure i was right. so I fired up a BizTalk 2006 virtual machine and again; He was right and I was wrong.

Now... those who know me will know that when I am convinced I am right, I will usually go to great lengths to prove it :-) So I stepped down a version and tried BizTalk 2004. Again no luck.

But FINALLY, when trying it on BizTalk 2002, it turned out that I was right. Back in BizTalk 2002, scripts were in VBScript and here you can not have multiple custom scripting functoids with methods with the same signature. In versions after BizTalk 2002, the compiler will collapse those methods into one, but in BizTalk 2000 and 2002, this is not done, and therefore an error occurs.

So all in all, I discovered this limitation back in 2003 and never questioned it again since. So let this be a lesson to all (especially me, because I always think I am right :-) ) - that sometimes we need to reevaluate what we think we know.

Hopefully this post will:

1. encourage people to reevaluate opinions and knowledge
2. inform others like me, who thinks that you cannot have the same method signature twice in a map, that this is wrong :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, I have written two previous posts about how to solve the If-Then-Else problem in a map. The first post discussed the way to use built-in functoids to solve the issue. The second post discussed the issues I had creating a custom functoid to do the job.

Well, I now have a new way of doing it, which is not just one functoid, but still it's prettier than what I can do with the built-in functoids.

Basically, as discussed in my post about the issues with the different functoid categories, a functoid that is in the String category cannot accept a logical functoid as input. A scripting functoid can accept a logical functoid as input, but I can't create a custom scripting functoid where I decide what script to appear inside the scripting functoid at design time.

So the solution I am describing in this post is a combination of the two.

This screenshot describes a map that solves the If-Then-Else problem:

The blue functoid with the crappy icon is programmed by myself. It is a simple functoid, which takes in three parameters, which are all strings. First, it tries to convert the first parameter to a boolean. If this fails, a "false" is assumed. Then, if the boolean was true, the second parameter is returned and if it was false, the third parameter is returned.

Now, since a string functoid cannot take a logical functoid as an input, I use a custom scripting functoid that is very simple:

public string Same(string str)
{
return str;
}

Which is really annoying to have to do, since... well... I take in a string and return the exact same string. Oh well...

You can find my functoid and the project that uses it as file downloads at the bottom of this post. Note, that the functoid library contains a whole bunch of functoids, of which only one is relevant. The library contains all the functoids I built trying to solve the If-Then-Else issue. The only needed functoid will be included in my downloadable functoid library at a later point.

Now, the advantages of this solution is, that it only requires three functoids all together. The best I could do with the built-in functoids were four, and five were sometimes the prettiest solution.

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, a colleague of mine is integrating with AS/400 and this system seems to be sending all strings as all-uppercase. So a company name might look like this: "JANS SUPERCOMPANY A/S". This really isn't what he wants output in the end, so I have built a functoid and added it to my downloadable collection, which converts the "JANS SUPERCOMPANY A/S" into "Jans Supercompany A/S". It has an optional set of strings that are not to be messed with :-)

Examples of output from the functoid. The second parameter is optional.

As always, you can download the functoid at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx - where you can also download the documentation.

--
eliasen

Hi all

After I gave a BizTalk presentation at Aalborg .NET User Group I got a message from Søren Spelling Lund from Århus .NET User Group who wanted to interview me about BizTalk for a Podcast. Naturally, I accepted, and the result can be found here.

Only in Danish, I am afraid.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have added a new program to be downloaded for free from http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx. This time it is a program to help you do two things:

1. Check an XML file to see if it is well formed
2. Validate an XML file against an XSD schema

I have had the need for a small utility to do this several times, in case a customer has some XML, and they want to know if the XML is even valid. The check for well formed-ness can be done by simply opening the file in Internet Explorer, but that is just soooo slow for large files. I tried a 70MB XML file once. It took IE a couple of hours to open it and tell me what was wrong with the XML. My utility did it in a few seconds.

So, use it if you want...

--
eliasen

Hi all

Today, I took the 70-241 exam in BizTalk 2006 R2.

I passed, and am now MCTS: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 :-)

I have now passed the exams in BizTalk 2000, BizTalk 2004, BizTalk 2006 and BizTalk 2006 R2. Anyone else out there who has done this? :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

At Logica we often participate in different events where employees compete to see who rides their bike more often to work, who walks the most steps in a month, and so on. After a month of competition, we end up with a spreadsheet, where I may have walked 180.000 steps, but my colleague Henrik only walked 78.000 steps (He is kind of a wimp :-) )

So lets say that we want to give a prize to one of us, and Henrik should have a chance of 78000/(78000+180000) (30,23%) of winning and I should have a chance of 180000/(78000+180000) (69,77%) of winning. As the number of points and the number of contestants get bigger, this becomes increasingly difficult to manage.

Therefore, I have written a small winforms program, that helps you manage this. You can add as many contestants as you like, and give them points. If you are only interested in a "normal" draw, you can just give all contestants one point.

Screen shot:

The program not only does the draw, it will also:

• Give you an overview of the contestants, their points and their chance of winning, which is dynamically updated each time a contestant is added
• Give you the opportunity to simulate any number of draws, to ensure that the program is random. When doing the simulation, the percentage of wins by each contestant is shown next to the chance of winning, so they can be compared.

I will gladly take comments, bug reports, suggestions, postcards, et cetera :-)

The documentation can be found at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx#documentation and the program can be downloaded at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx#winform.

I hope this comes in handy to someone.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I am using http://www.last.fm to keep track of what I listen to, and to get inspired to listen to some new music that I didn't know I liked.

You can find my profile at http://www.last.fm/user/eliasen and you can find information about an excellent Danish band Baal at http://www.last.fm/music/Baal. Please note, though, that I listen to the Danish band Baal, and not the Japanese band that unfortunately shares the band name Baal with the Danish band.

Anyway, the point of this blog post is, that it seems that I am currently the top listener of Baal:

:-)

This means that I listen to more Baal than all that listen to either the Danish or the Japanese band...

I know... Get a life, damn it! :-)

Baal have a web site at http://www.baalworld.com - try it! :-)

--
eliasen

Hi all

It is time for the third posting in my series about using BizTalk to integrate to Excel spreadsheets. My first two postings are here (Installation) and here (The schema generation wizard).

This third posting is a talk about the runtime, and how it works.

The setup

To start out, I have done a simple test, and you can find my project

It has a simple spreadsheet and a schema for this spreadsheet (both are described in my previous post) and the setup basically just has a FILE Receive Location and a send port with a filter that takes everything from the Receive Port the Receive Location belongs to. My aim is to see how fast the Spread Disassembler is.

First, a short description of my setup:

My BizTalk installation is in a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine.

The host machine is a Hewlett Packard 8710w laptop with an Intel Core Duo T7700 2,4GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM and Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 and completely updated as of 7'th December 2008.

The guest system is a virtual machine which has one 2,4GHz CPU, 1GB RAM and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition SP2 - also completely updated as of 7'th December 2008.

The test

I created 999 copies of the same spreadsheet and moved them into a folder watched by the receive location. They were read, transformed into XML, and output into the output folder in 3:19 minutes. This is an average of 5 spreadsheets per second.

This took me by surprise - I had expected it to be faster. So I decided to do things more academic than looking at the time stamps of the output files. After all, there are PLENTY of functionality that could be the time consumer. So I created a BAM Activity and View, tracking when my Receive Port starts and when it ends.

A table showing the average processing time can be seen here:

So it is pretty clear, that performance drops drastically when the load increases. I do not blame this on the Spread Disassembler, though. Since this is a virtual PC, with SQL Server on the same box as BizTalk, the mere I/O operations when writing all the output files to the hard drive conflicts with the I/O operations of BizTalk using the MessageBox. I find this a much more likely issue for the drop in performance than that the disassembler should get slower just because more messages come in.

So, to sum up, it seems that the Spread Disassembler can take a pretty heavy load - Up to 2643 messages per minute (44 messages per second). This is given less than ideal operating and hardware conditions, but optimal conditions with regards to the BizTalk Server not doing anything else at the time.

Maybe in a later post I will take a look at more complex spreadsheets/schemas and also test the performance of the assembler.

--
eliasen

Hi all

The company hosting the eliasen.dk domain went bancrupt last friday (19'th December 2008), and I only just found out this morning (Monday the 22'nd December).

So basically, everything since my last backup (27'th November 2008) is gone!

Right now, I am trying to setup the blog on the new server and trying to see if I can repost the blog posts I have written since the 27'th November.

--
eliasen

Hi all

A new functoid has been added to the collection of functoids that an be downloaded at http://www.eliasen.eu/Downloadsoftware.aspx.

The functoid simply takes one parameter, which is used as a key against BizTalks app.config (The BTSNTSvc.exe.config file in BizTalks installation folder) to read an application setting from the appSettings group.

So given a .config file like this:

<appSettings>
<add key="eliasen" value="eliasenValue" />
</appSettings>

and the parameter "eliasen" to the functoid, it will return "eliasenValue". If the key cannot be found, an empty string is returned.

And the documentation has also been updated - look at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have added a new functoid to my functoid library.

This functoid will take a string, that is separated by some character as input and split it up into the substrings it is, given the separator. It will then return the substring given by a third parameter.

So for instance, given these three inputs:

1. Jan,Eliasen,BizTalk
2. ,
3. 1

You would get "Eliasen" as output.

You can download my functoid library at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx and here you can also find updated documentation describing this new functoid.

--
eliasen

Hi all

As you have probably read in my previous posts this month, I have started creating a functoid library, which is freely downloadable if you want to. Now, I have also written some documentation for it (Wauv, I know...). So go to http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx for the software, and here you can find a link to http://www.eliasen.eu/files/eliasen.eu.documentation.docx which contains the documentation for the downloadable software.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have added a new functoid to the collection of functoids I am building. This time, I have programmed a functoid that converts between different datetime formats, which comes in handy when mapping between two schemas that have date elements, that require different formats of the date.

You can find version 4 of my functoid collection at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx

--
eliasen

Hi all

Recently, I started using Windows Live Writer in large scale. Until then, I used the built in editing functionality of dasBlog, which is my blog software.

I must say, I love it!

Now, don't get me wrong, I have no other software products that do what Windows Live Writer does to compare it with, so there might be other and better products out there, but I am SO happy with not using the built in functionality of dasBlog anymore, I just had to tell you all :-)

The obvious advantages for using Windows Live Writer over the built in functionality in dasBlog are the possibility to work offline, either if my blog is unavailable or if I am in a train, and so on.

But also, I am quite fond of the way I can have multiple entries as work in progress at the same time, edit existing posts, etc. And all in a thick client on my laptop.

Really, I am quite thrilled :-) And I encourage all to use it... There is a newer version out than the 2008 that I am using, but it is a beta version, and some people have reported issues with using it against dasBlog, so I will wait a bit before I try that version.

--
eliasen

Hi all

This is the second post in a series about solving the "If-Then-Else" problem in a map. In my first post I discussed how to use BizTalks built-in functionality to solve the problem. Neither of the three proposed solutions really seem nice to me, so I wondered how difficult it might be to code a custom functoid that does the trick. It turned out to be unexpectedly hard, and this post tries to clarify my findings and explain them.

So, to continue from my previous post, to me the best solution is to code your own functoid, that mimics the value mapping functoid, but adds an "else" part. So basically just a third parameter to the value  mapping functoid that is returned in case the first parameter is false.

For information about how to program a custom functoid, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560879.aspx - I wont go into details about that here. I will just comment on the issues I have had with creating this particular functoid.

The final solution should give me the possibility to have a map like this one:

YES, I know my icons are very bad... Anyway, three inputs: a boolean and two values.

So, getting to the code, my first try looked like this:

-- BEGIN CODE
this.SetMinParams(3);
this.SetMaxParams(3);
this.Category = FunctoidCategory.ValueMapping;
this.OutputConnectionType = ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord;
AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);
AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);
AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);
-- END CODE

I have removed irrelevant lines, such as setting up the resources, setting the ID, and so on.

First of all, in the code of a custom functoid, you need to specify which category the functoid should belong to. The possibilities are listed at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.biztalk.basefunctoids.functoidcategory.aspx. I hadn't really looked at this list, since I thought that the intellisense in VS.NET 2005 was good enough. Since my functoid is an advanced value mapping functoid, I chose he value mapping category. This turned out a but different than I thought. It turns out, that the category you assign to a custom functoid not only determines where in the toolbox it should be placed, but also sometimes some extra functionality is added to the functoid. Given my map above, I had expected that the created XSLT would just call my functoid with the three parameters and then my code would do the rest. But the generated XSLT looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:var="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/var" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl var s0 userCSharp" version="1.0" xmlns:s0="http://eliasen.eu.BizTalk.TestProject.InputSchema" xmlns:ns0="http://eliasen.eu.BizTalk.TestProject.OutputSchema" xmlns:userCSharp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/userCSharp">
  <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" method="xml" version="1.0" />
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="/s0:InputRoot" />
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="/s0:InputRoot">
    <xsl:variable name="var:v1" select="userCSharp:LogicalEq(string(qualifier/text()) , &quot;Jan&quot;)" />
    <ns0:OutputRoot>
      <xsl:if test="string($var:v1)='true'">
        <xsl:variable name="var:v2" select="IfTrue/text()" />
        <OutputField>
          <xsl:value-of select="$var:v2" />
        </OutputField>
      </xsl:if>
    </ns0:OutputRoot>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I have removed all the lines associated with the equals-functoid as that included three inline c# methods which are irrelevant. Anyway, as you can see, my functoid is not being called at all. Because I chose the ValueMapping category, the generated xslt assumes it is actually a built-in value mapping functoid and it totally overrules the logic inside the functoid.

So, this really came as a surprise to me... but well...it makes sense when you think about it, naturally. Some of the types of functoids just require logic that goes beyond the code inside a functoid.

So, the ValueMapping category just didn't work for me. Then I thought; "Oh, who cares?"? I will just use the String category instead, because those certainly do not have weird functionality around them... they get input and return a string as output, that is it. And the functoid will just appear in the String group in the toolbox in VS.NET.

That gave me a new headache, that was another surprise; You cannot connect the output of a logical functoid to the input of a string functoid. So... I was stuck.

One of my solutions would accept the output of a logical functoid as input, but my functoid logic was overridden. The other simply wouldn't accept the output of a logical functoid as input.

I have tried the following FunctoidCategories:

So, basically, I haven't been able to do it... for now. Either I cannot connect a logical functoid to my custom functoid, I get an error either at compile time or something goes wrong semantically at runtime.

I haven't given up 100% yet... but I must say, that the task has turned out to be a whole lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

Look out for a part 3 in this series... if it comes, I will have solved this issue :-)

--
eliasen

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:

To see this for your self, download

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have often wondered why the built-in functoids doesn't encompass an If-Then-Else functoid. The Value Mapping functoid only has an If-Then-part and not the Else-part.

This is the first of two blog posts. This post will explore how to solve the issue with the built-in functionality of BizTalk. The next post will be about creating a custom functoid to do the job instead and the issues that come with this task.

So, using the built-in functionality:

Imagine this input schema:

And imagine this output schema:

My goal, now is to create a map that will map the value of the "ifJan" element to the destination IF the "qualifier" element equals the word "Jan" and otherwise the value of the "ifNotJan" element should be mapped.

So basically, given this input:

<ns0:IfThenElseInput xmlns:ns0="http://IfThenElse.IfThenElseInput">
  <qualifier>Jan</qualifier>
  <ifJan>ifJan</ifJan>
  <ifNotJan>ifNotJan</ifNotJan>
</ns0:IfThenElseInput>

I want this output:

<ns0:IfThenElseOutput xmlns:ns0="http://IfThenElse.IfThenElseOutput">
  <field>ifJan</field>
</ns0:IfThenElseOutput>

And given this input:

<ns0:IfThenElseInput xmlns:ns0="http://IfThenElse.IfThenElseInput">
  <qualifier>NotJan</qualifier>
  <ifJan>ifJan</ifJan>
  <ifNotJan>ifNotJan</ifNotJan>
</ns0:IfThenElseInput>

I want this output:

<ns0:IfThenElseOutput xmlns:ns0="http://IfThenElse.IfThenElseOutput">
  <field>ifNotJan</field>
</ns0:IfThenElseOutput>

Using a map and the built-in functoids, that would look like this:

Basically, you need one value mapping functoid for each possible value to pass on, and a logical functoid for each value as well, to use in the value mapping functoid. The "String Concatenate" functoid is just my way of returning the string to use for the qualifier - in this case: "Jan".

You can also do it using one scripting functoid like this:

where the scripting functoid is an "Inline XSLT Call Template" scripting type, and the script looks likes this:

<xsl:template name="IfThenElse">
  <xsl:param name="qualifier" />
  <xsl:param name="ifJan" />
  <xsl:param name="ifNotJan" />
  <xsl:element name="field">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="$qualifier='Jan'">
        <xsl:value-of select="$ifJan" />
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="$ifNotJan" />
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

Now... IF my good friend Henrik Badsberg is reading this, then by now he is screaming: "USE A BLOODY C# SCRIPTING FUNCTOID!!!!!" :-)

This, naturally is also an option:

with an "Inline C#" script containing this script:

public string IfThenElse(string qualifier, string ifJan, string ifNotJan)
{
  if (qualifier == "Jan")
    return ifJan;
  else
    return ifNotJan;
}

Both scripting solutions can be altered to accept the output of a logical functoid as the first input. Just change the string "Jan" to "true" in the scripts, and change the name of the parameter if you want.

Now then... I am not a big fan of either of these three options. Generally, I avoid scripting functoids when I can because it is difficult for a new developer to know what is happening when he opens the map because he will have to open up all scripting functoids and find out (and remember) what they do. Also, I am not really a big fan of the first solution either. First of all, there are too many functoids, and it can messy if this solution is needed several times in a map. Secondly, you get a warning every time you compile, because you have two inputs to one element.

In my next post, I will look into creating a custom functoid that does the job and I can tell you right now; That isn't as easy as I had imagined...

--
eliasen

Hi all

On October 29'th I did a BizTalk presentation for the Aalborg .NET User Group. It was the first in AANUG, so it makes sense that the topic should be the best topic ever :-)

Those who were present will remember that I completely broke the time frame I was bound by, and didn't even make it all the way through my presentation.

Weird, how I always get side tracked when I talk about something I am good at and/or like :-)

Anyway, this blog post has two purposes:

1. Just a little more advertising for Aalborg .NET User Group. If you live close by, sign up and come to our meetings
2. To make the slides available.

   They can be found here.

   Only in Danish, I am afraid.

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, I have just added one more functoid to the collection of functoids. This time, I have added a string replace functoid, as I think that is really missing from the standard functoids that BizTalk supplies.

You can get version 3 of my functoid collection here: http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx

And for those of you that are not bothered to read further on the download page than the download section, let me just repeat some text from the download page:

-- BEGIN QUOTE

As you can probably see from my extremely lousy icons, layouts, and so on, graphics really isn't one of my strong sides. So if you are good at creating icons and so on, and would like to help me with this part, please contact me.

-- END QUOTE

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have just added a new functoid to my collection (which now consists of TWO functoids :-) ). This new functoid is a functoid that simply returns a new GUID.

You can download it at http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have had on my to do list for ages, that I should start developing some functoids that might be nice to have.

Well, finally I have started, and my first functoid can be downloaded from http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx.

Note, that the eliasen.eu domain has just been moved from one hosting company to another, which means that the link might not work for another day or so.

Comments, bug reports, suggestions, and so on are very welcome.

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have changed the config of my blog software (dasBlog) so all comments have to be approved by me. I hate to have to do this, but apparently, the upgrade to a newer version has made it easy for spammers to write silly comments with links to all sorts of weird web sites (I guess they are weird - naturally, I have never clicked on one...). I have already delete 5 inappropriate comments to posts, and they seem to come faster and faster.

I will ask the programmers of dasBlog to see what is happening, and then disable the approval flow once I have it solved.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

--
eliasen

Hi all

So, it is time for the second part of the series about using the FarPoint BizTalk adapter for Excel spreadsheets. You can find my first post in the series, which was about the installation of the component here.

So, this post is about the wizard that guides you through creating a schema for an Excel spreadsheet.

I created a simple spreadsheet to test with. It has two sheets, which you can see here:

Basically, two sheets - one with order lines and one with comments. So, firing up the wizard:

The first thing to do is to add a new item to your project, and choose the new schema type "Spreadsheet Schema Wizard". The wizard fires up automatically, when you click "Add".

The first screen of the wizard isn't really a surprise :-) It wants to you tell it which file to use as a base for the schema, and give a target namespace and inform it about what code page to use.

When browsing for files, I noticed that the components apparently not only deals with spreadsheets (Excel 97-2003 as well as 2007) but also delimited files. So note to my self: Look at that functionality later on - maybe it is better than BizTalks built-in support for that, or perhaps more suitable in some situations. Maybe that's a blog post that will appear at some point :-)

So, a few more settings to set, all of which are described in the documentation.

Now, it shows me the data in the first sheet of the spreadsheet. It has removed all cells that it has decided are not used for data. Now, I need to select the cells with data in them, like this:

and when I click on the next sheet (Comments), I get to select data from that sheet as well:

Notice, that I can only select rows - I can not select single cells or leave some columns out.

The next step is to select names for the columns, choose whether they should be elements or attributes and also the data type of the columns.

There are four data types available, double, float, datetime and string.

Just to find the difference between the float and double, I chose one of each in my example and clicked "Finish".

The resulting schema looks like the one above. For each sheet, there is a sheetname attribute, a header record and a record for the data, which is reoccurring. The double and float elements were translated into the xs:float and xs:double types... not really surprising, you might say :-)

Looking at the properties of the schema, the path to the base spreadsheet has been pre filled for you in the "Input Instance Filename" and the type is set to "Native".

When validating the instance, I get this XML, which looks like I expected it to.

So, to sum up, the wizard is really simple to use and it takes basically no time to create the schema.

The major thing I would like to see improved is that I can only have one type of data in one sheet, meaning that the data in all rows must be for instance order lines, inventory items, or something like that. I can't have an order header and the order lines in the same sheet, and I can't have a sheet with an order header which spans multiple lines. This really restricts the spreadsheets that can be parsed.

My next post in the series will be about the runtime, where I will setup a running instance of my project and see how it functions at runtime.

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eliasen

Hi all

For those of you, who use Togi as a Twitter client, there is now a Danish translation of it available for download... and, as you will notice on the page, I did the Danish translation :-) Although... I use the English version myself... but that is besides the point :-)

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eliasen

Hi all

So, I finally decided to try out the FarPoint BizTalk adapter for Excel spreadsheets. It's always nice to have tried as many adapters as possible, so I can use this knowledge when talking to customers.

This post is the first of a series of posts about this product. The first post is about installation and the basic functionality. The next posts will go deeper into separate functionality.

Let me just make one thing clear before I begin: I am not in any way affiliated with FarPoint Technologies, nor are they paying me anything to write these posts.

So, to begin; The installation was easy. Just a next-next-finish wizard. All the information needed from you is the product code, a serial number, and the installation folder, if you want to change that.

After installation, I have the functionality I would expect from this kind of product:

1. Pipeline components to use in pipelines
   
2. Schema extension for the schemas
   
3. Wizard to help me create the schemas
   
4. Documentation
   

So, to sum up:

1. The installation is easy.
2. The architecture of the solution seems to be exactly what I would expect, ie. pipeline components, schema extensions and a wizard.

My next post in the series will take a deeper look at the wizard for creating schemas for use by the pipeline disassembler and assembler.

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eliasen

Hi all

In almost all multiple server installations of BizTalk I have encountered, there has been issues with MSDTC. MSDTC is Microsofts product for handling distributed transactions, meaning transactions that span multiple servers. BizTalk uses this in high scale, when running transactions against SQL Server, to maintain consistency in BizTalks databases.

All issues with MSDTC are solvable - sometimes it is just hard to figure out what is wrong.

First of all, always use the DTCTester tool at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293799 to test your MSDTC installation. If this tool reports no errors and you are still having issues, then most likely, MSDTC isn't the cause of your issues.

If something is wrong with MSDTC, I have encountered four major issues:

1. MSDTC doesn't run on either of the server. Solve this by starting MSDTC. Steps to start MSDTC (Note, that the MMC snapin is buggy, and it might appear that the "Component Services" node has no children... but it does, trust me :-) ):

1. Go to "Administrative Tools" => "Component Services"
2. Go to "Component Services" => "Computers" => "My Computer"
3. Right click "My Computer" and choose "Start MS DTC".
   

MSDTC isn't configured for network access on both servers. Solve this in "add/remove windows components" here:

1. Run "msdtc -uninstall" from a command prompt
2. reboot
3. Run "msdtc -install" from a command prompt
4. reboot

1. Get the network administrator to update your DNS
2. Enter new information into the hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

Hope this helps.

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eliasen

Hi all

Finally, I have managed to end the upgrading-hell it has been. I am now up to version 2.2.8279.16125 of dasBlog, and this is currently the latest release. I didn't have the guts to upgrade directly from 1.9 to 2.2, so I went over 2.0 and 2.1 to get there.

To me, everything looks ok - let me know if you discover anything else.

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eliasen

Hi all

I have just upgraded dasBlog to 2.1.8102.813.

I hope this hasn't introduced weird behavior. Please contact me if you encounter errors or issues.

Thanks

--
eliasen

Hi all

I have just upgraded to dasBlog version 2.0.7226.0.

I am hoping it went without issues, but would appreciate an email if you discover any issues.

Thanks.

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eliasen

Hi all

The CSD/BizTalk Product Group is conducting a survey to assess customer usage of the Business Rules Engine (BRE).

They have sent a link to us MVP's to get our opinion, but would also like the opinion of BizTalk consultants, BizTalk customers, and so on.

If you can spare a few minutes, please take the survey at https://live.datstat.com/MSCSD-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=BRE_Usage_Survey_Blog

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eliasen

Hi all

Today, a former customer of mine called me and had a question. She is using updategrams to insert rows into a table in SQL Server, and she had a problem with dates. The input CSV sometimes had an empty string for a date.

This would translate in the XML to an element with an empty string inside it. This would then get mapped to an attribute for that column in the table, and when SQL Server read the updategram, the 01-01-1900 was inserted into the date field because no other value was specified.

The customer wants null to be inserted instead. She asked me how to do this, and I said that that was easy - I would send her an example later this night.

So I started preparing my example, and it turns out, that my approach only works for elements and records - I have never before had to suppress an attribute, so I wasn't aware of this. My approach being, bye the way, that I connect a logical functoid to the destination node that I don't want created under some circumstances. But a logical functoid can not be connected to an attribute in the destination schema. Bummer.

So I eventually went with a custom scripting functoid, and my example ended up like this:

Input schema:

Just a plain schema with three elements, all required.

The output schema:

This schema has three attributes to simulate the updategram and also an element just to show the approach for elements.

The map ended up like this:

Element1 goes to att1 and Element3 goes to att3. No magic there.

As for element2 in the output, I have used to functoids to get it to be created only when a string is present in the source. The first functoid (the red one) is a "String Size" functoid, which returns the length of a string. The green functoid is a "Not equal to" functoid, which has the string length as one parameter and the constant "0" as the other parameter. The order of these parameters do not matter. So basically, at runtime, the element2 element is created if and only if, the length of the string in Element2 is larger than 0. For this particular customer, I could have used the "Logical Date" functoid instead of the combination of these two functoids, since that will return true if the input string is a date, which is exactly what I want. But the above solution is more general and applies to a lot more scenarios. Downside being, of course, that the above solution will accept a "abc" as a string, and since the length is larger than 0, it will get to the output.

Anyway, the customer didn't have elements, but attributes. for this I had to use a custom scripting functoid with this code:

Basically, this call template takes one parameter, being the element in the source that might be empty. It then check the value to see if it is different from the empty string, and if it is not the empty string, an attribute is created and the value for the attribute is set to the input parameter.

Now, as a side node, the input my customer has is a CSV file, so actually, in this case you can also take advantage of a nice little property on the schema. To demonstrate, I have created a flat file schema for a CSV input:

As you can see in the properties window, I have set "Suppress Empty Nodes" to "Yes". When BizTalk parses the flat file, the nodes that would be created as empty nodes now aren't created at all. This means, that the map can just look like this:

No functoids required, and it will give the exact same output as the above map. Do notice, that this only works with flat files where you make BizTalk suppress empty nodes.

So, that was all... feel free to ask questions :-)

I hope this turns out to be helpful to someone.

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eliasen

Hi all

Today i read an email from a guy who had a problem with optional elements in an input giving problems in a positional flat file output. The issue being, of course, that if an element in the input of a map is optional, it might be missing. If the element is missing, it will not be created in the destination of a map, and therefore, the flat file assembler will complain because it needs the element to create the correct positional structure.

I seem to have it working, and will here walk through my solution to explain it.

First of all, I have a Schema for the XML input:

All elements are 1..1 except Element2, which has minOccurs=0.

Secondly, I have a schema for the flat file output:

All elements are mandatory. The record delimiter is 0x0d 0x0a and the two subrecords to the root are positional records.

The map is pretty straight forward:

Just plain connections between the elements.

For testing purposes, I have two test instances, that validate against the input schema. They are exactly the same, except one doesn't have the "Element2"-element in it.

If I try to test the map with the input that has the "Element2"-element, and turn on validation of both input and output, and let the output be "Native", then it will work. If, however, I test the map inside Visual Studio .NET with the example that does not have the Element2 element, it will fail. It will report that:

Output validation error: The element 'FirstElements' has incomplete content. List of possible elements expected: 'Element6'.

So basically, the map does not create the Element6 element in the destination schema, and since the Element6 element is required, it fails validation.

BUT, here comes the surprise; It works if it is deployed. So basically, there must be some inconstency between how the map tester in VS.NET works and how the stuff works when running.

I tried changing the schemas to include an element inside the first record as the last element, such that the input has a "SomeElements" record with three elements inside it, of which only the second is optional. Likewise I added a new element in the output schema and updated the map. You can see all three here:

Still, I only get errors when testing inside Visual Studio .NET and not when things are deployed and running... Which actually bugs me a bit, but that is a whole other story.

So, to sum up, I only have three explanations as to why it works for me and not for the fellow with the issue:

1. He is using a BizTalk version that is not BizTalk 2006 R2
2. He hasn't tried deploying it, and is relying on the map tester
3. He has some bogus values for the two properties I will mention below

At the end of this post, let me just quickly mention to properties that are available for flat file schemas:

The "Generate Empty Nodes" and "Suppress Empty Nodes" properties might be helpful. They are defined here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa559329.aspx

Hope this helps someone.

You can find my project here: FlatFileEmptyElements.zip (27.55 KB)

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eliasen

Hi all

I have just been informed by my MVP Lead, that Patrick Tisseghem, a very excellent SharePoint guru and co-founder of U2U has passed away a couple of days ago.

I have had the pleasure of listening t Patrick talk only once, but he left an impression of a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic professional, as well as a great guy who is happy to meet people and talk to them about what ever is one his/their minds.

My thoughts go to his wife, his children and the rest of his family.

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eliasen

Hi all

I am probably the 234'th blogger to write about this, but just in case...

Alan Smith has decided to maintain two bloggers guides for now... One is the commonly known Bloggers Guide to BizTalk. The new one is the Bloggers Guide to Oslo, which deals with the oslo related technologies, such as WCF and WF.

Alan has had the guide on gotdotnet earlier, but now he has created the http://bloggersguides.net/ site, which I highly recommend you monitor closely :-)

That's all, folks.

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eliasen

Hi all

I am happy to announce, that a couple of great guys are planning to start a .NET User Group here in Aalborg, Denmark, where I am happy to live.

Information about the group can be found at their web site at http://www.aanug.dk/ - no information yet, though. It will appear soon, they promise :-)

Looking forward to seeing what it will be about. Hopefully, I can spread the word about BizTalk and learn more / tell about Oslo.

Anyway, if you are in the Aalborg area, consider emailing the guys and join the group. Lets get a good start!

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eliasen

Hi everyone

Yes, I know that my web page is in blue colours. Yes, I know my blog is in blue colours. Yes, I know my new BizTalk site is in blue colours. And yess, I know that my sons web page is in blue colours.

Yes, I like blue colours - quit whining! :-D

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eliasen

Hi everyone.

I often realize, that I need some information, but can't really remember what the thing was called or where to get it.

So I decided to keep track of all the BizTalk stuff I find on my way at http://biztalk.eliasen.dk - which is now officially launched :-)

Until now, not much information is there, but it will grow eventually.

Please, always also use the http://biztalk247.com website, since it really has a great collection of data... But feel free to use my new site, if you want :-)

Hope this is useful for someone...

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eliasen

Hi everyone!

A couple of hours ago, I received a mail from Microsoft stating, that I have been awarded the MVP title!

I cannot begin to describe, how happy I am with this, since I made it a personal goal of mine a couple of years ago, to get the title back. I had it from July 2004 to July 2005, as some of you know.

I have even danced a little bit in our living room with my hands above my head, I must confess :-)

I truly am happy to get the title back, since it means that Microsoft values my skills within the BizTalk field and that I must have helped a lot of people in the online communities.

To learn more about the MVP program, you can click here.

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eliasen

Hi everyone.

I have just upgraded the software on my blog to dasBlog version 1.9.7174.1.

I hope it has been smooth for you all, and if you notie any difficulties, please let me know.

Later, I will upgarde to dasBlog 2.0, which has been out forquite some time, but one step at the time, ight? :-)

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eliasen

Hi

Finally(!) I found time (Well, I should probably have done something else...) to review the design of my eliasen.dk homepage. It was awful, black and very much outdated.

The new design is better, updated, brighter, happier, implemented in .NET and much more :-)

If you have comments about it, feel free to send them to me.

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eliasen

Hi

Well, the time has come for me to start running again.

11 years ago (when I was a soldier), I was quite the runner. My best times are 5 km in 17:30 and half a marathon (21,0975 km) in 1:32:46.

Since then, the weight has come up, as the amount of exercise went down :-).

Anyway, I have lost about 7kg in the last 3-4 months, and now was the time to start running again... and today was the first time.

A local fitness center had an offer for new members, that I have taken, so not only did I run today for the first time in a very long time, I also did it on a running machine. That took some getting used to! :-) I managed to get the damn machine running, but then it stopped... then I started it again... and then it stopped. Probably next time I will get some help figuring out how to set the machine appropriately. The run itself went fairly well... around 7km. I will have to bring some music the next time, though.

It felt pretty weird, that I did some interval training, where the maximum speed (16 km/h) was just about the same speed as I ran for an hour without breaks in my earlier years (15 km/h) :-)

So, any goals, Jan? Yes, off course. I have a couple;

1. I would like my average time to run 1 km to be about 4 minutes.
2. At "Limfjordsløbet" (14 km) at the end of May (2008 :-) ), I want to run faster than a friend of mine called Tom. Also, running faster than my old boss Anne would be nice :-). 4 minutes per kilometer would take care of both :-)
3. At some point, I want to run a marathon. I will wait a couple of months to set any specific dates, times, etc. for this one, since I am really in no shape to guess right now :-)

My legs are fine, I believe.. but perhaps tomorrow I will edit that part out of this blog post :-)

The plan now is to run every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday on average.. sometimes it will be Wednesday instead of Tuesday and so on.

Wish me luck...

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eliasen

So...

People sometimes ask, what is the difference between catching System.Exception and the General Exception in a Catch Exception shape in the orchestration designer in BizTalk.

Off course, an obvious difference is, that with the General Exception, you don't get an object with properties to investigate. But then it seems that the General Exception is useless... surely there is a point to it?

Well, I was curious about this myself, so I investigated a bit, and found this post. So basically, I think the catch of the general exception in BizTalk 2006 is a left over from BizTalk 2004. In BizTalk 2004 it made sense, since you actually have exceptions thrown at you that didn't derive from System.Exception. That is no longer possible in .NET 2.0 - they just haven't removed it from the designer - probably just to be backwards compatible.

That's it...

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eliasen

Hi everyone

Right now I am attending the Quicklearn BizTalk 2006 R2 Deep Dive course. I have taken their BizTalk 2004 deep dive and 2006 deep dive earlier, and now the time has come to the R2 one.

The last two times I was taught by John Callaway, and this time it is Alan Smith.

Basically, if you feel like taking a BizTalk course, that goes deeper than the normal courses, I highly recommend the quicklean course.

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eliasen

Hi

Inspired by my post some weeks ago about me mending a fuse on our car, I really have outdone myself this time.

First of all, I have changed a light bulbe on my parents car.

Secondly, I have exchanged the dripping faucet in our kitchen for a brand new none-dripping one. It was actually quite a mess, and after a couple of trial-and-errors, I got it working. So now we have a new faucet in the kitchen - it doesn't drip, and I made the switch!

:-)

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eliasen

Hi

Recently, I ran into a peculiar problem, which really had me fooled a long time.

Basically, I had a BizTalk Server 2006 R2 solution running. It consisted of 10 assemblies. One of the orchestrations in each of 9 of the assemblies was exposed as a web service, all using complex types - no strings, ints and so on.

And then there was the system, that was to call my web services. I had no saying over that system. We started calling the first web service. Everything went ok. Then they implemented code to call the second web service, everything OK... all was well (except some minor things here and there) for the first eight web services.

But at the ninth web service, strange things started to happen.

Basically, the other system would call my web service, IIS would return http 200 OK, but still, no data came into BizTalk. I had NOTHING in group hub page, nothing in HAT, nothing in the eventlog, NOTHING! IIS log said: I received a post on this url and responded with 200 OK - that's it - nothing more.

Really weird - I mean... where did the XML go? Why were there no errors? So we installed YATT, which is an http sniffer tool, that would be able to tell us what was exatly sent across the wires. Basically, what we found out was, that allthough the sender might have send 13000 bytes, the sniffer only reported maybe 10500 bytes. So we started investigating the network. The two servers were on the same subnet, one hop away from eachother. So no servers on the route could mingle with the traffic.

I decided that I would write my own little C# test program, that would call the web service and see if that failed as well. It didn't. I ended up calling the web service succesfully with more than 100k (I didn't bother to try anything higher than that.)

But it turned out, that the sniffer must have a bug - it reported all sorts of different numbers, when using my test program, and none were correct. Apparently, it wasn't created to handle large packets, but just a few kilobytes. So we installed wireshark instead (get it from sourceforge). Now THAT is a nice tool! Totally professional (and free), and it showed us everything that came in and out - no limitations.

So we did a test with my tool, and a test with the other system, and tried comparing the http headers, the soap action, and so on. It turned out, that all the other web services, when called by the other system, returned http 202 Accept and not http 200 OK. And when my test program called the web service, it got the http 202 Accept.

We ended up discovering what the issue was. The other system (programmed in .NET) wasn't calling my web services the "right way". They were sending everything using httprequests. Now, this is a perfectly legal way of doing it, but it really requires that you know what you are doing. I mean: They added a header to the httprequest for the SOAPAction, and then they built up XML with the soap envelope, soap body, elements for the web method and inside that the actual XML. This was just a string that they sent using httprequest.

The answer ended up being that the XML that the other system was sending me had invalid data in elements of type xsd:date. So basically, the XML couldn't be deserialized into the object that my web method on the web service was expecting. Therefore, the web method was never called, and therefore there was no data in biztalks log, the eventlog or anywhere else.

So, I have learned two things from this:

1. You should always accept the help your programming environment gives you. If the programmer of the other system had added a web reference to the web service and built XML and deserialized it into the object that was the parameter, he would have gotten an exception at runtime, that he could debug. The way he did it meant that we got NO errors at all - the data just disappeared (which I think .NET shouldn't do. Some sort of warning somewhere would have been nice.)

2. When debugging, don't trust the tools you download you to help debugging :-)

I hope this can help someone.

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eliasen

Hi

I am currently supporting an existing BizTalk 2004 environment, and came across the need to debug an orchestration in the production environment. Yes, I know - "Not in the production environment", you scream... but yes, indeed - in the production environment.

Anyway, I set some breakpoints, waited for the orchestration to hit the breakpoint and tried to attach to the orchestration. I got this error:

Debugging user validation against group '<servername>\BizTalk Server Administrators' failed with error: Debuging Client is not a BizTalk Server Administrator.

This seemed odd, so I investigated a bit further. It turns out, that the setup is a multiple server setup, ie. one server for SQL Server and one for BizTalk 2004. Also, it tunrs out, that the gyuy who installed the servers didn't use domain groups. The services were running under domain accounts, but the BizTalk groups were created on both machines. Not a supported setup, but I am hoping they will upgrade to BizTalk 2006 R2 before long, and therefore, we are not going to touch that.

Anyway, it turns out, that the user I was logged in as was a member of the "BizTalk Server Administrators" group - but only on the BizTalk Server. Once I added him to the same group on the SQL Server server, all was fine.

I googled the error, and didn't stumble upon an answer, so I just thought I'd blog about it in case anyone has the need for the answer some day :-)

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eliasen

Hi

I just thought I would share my experiences from the first BizTalk 2006 R2 I have installed and configured.

It was on two different boxes - one for SQL Server and one for BizTalk. Domain groups were created beforehand, as well as a service account for the services. So everything should be in place.

Installation went fine, naturally, but the configuration wouldn't let me configure Group and Runtime. I checked the logs, off course, and the first error was this one:

[09:14:15 Info ConfigHelper]  is not a local entity.
[09:14:15 Error ConfigHelper] d:\depot2300\mercury\private\common\configwizard\confighelper\service.cpp(729): FAILED hr = 80070421

[09:14:15 Warning ConfigHelper] The account name is invalid or does not exist, or the password is invalid for the account name specified.
[09:14:15 Warning ConfigHelper]  Failed to validate service credentials for account: %1

So it had to be something about the credentials I have specified. So I unconfigured, reconfigured, being very carefully to enter the correct credentials - same error. I tried again, with extra extra focus on not mistyping anything. Same error.

Then I searched some more in the log file, and found this:

2007-09-25 09:16:49:0441 [INFO] WMI Deploying 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas.dll'
2007-09-25 09:16:49:0723 [WARN] AdminLib GetBTSMessage: hrErr=80070002; Msg=The system cannot find the file specified.;
2007-09-25 09:16:49:0723 [WARN] AdminLib GetBTSMessage: hrErr=c0c02560; Msg=Failed to read "KeepDbDebugKey" from the registry.
The system cannot find the file specified.;

But the file actually existed. Then I searched the log file some more, and found this:

2007-09-25 09:16:49:0863 [INFO] WMI Error occurred during database creation; attempt to rollback and delete the partially created database'hcpr-hd-axa-01\BizTalkMgmtDb'
2007-09-25 09:16:49:0863 [INFO] WMI Calling CDataSource.Open() against hcpr-hd-axa-01\master
2007-09-25 09:16:49:0879 [INFO] WMI CDataSource.Open() returned
2007-09-25 09:17:09:0942 [WARN] WMI Rollback failed.  Could not delete database.
2007-09-25 09:17:09:0942 [ERR] WMI Failed in pAdmInst->Create() in CWMIInstProv::PutInstance(). HR=c0c025b3
2007-09-25 09:17:09:0942 [ERR] WMI WMI error description is generated: Exception of type 'System.EnterpriseServices.TransactionProxyException' was thrown.
2007-09-25 09:17:09:0942 [INFO] WMI CWMIInstProv::PutInstance() finished. HR=c0c025b3
[09:17:09 Error BtsCfg] d:\depot2300\mercury\private\mozart\source\setup\btscfg\btswmi.cpp(358): FAILED hr = c0c025b3

[09:17:09 Error BtsCfg] Exception of type 'System.EnterpriseServices.TransactionProxyException' was thrown.
[09:17:09 Error BtsCfg] d:\depot2300\mercury\private\mozart\source\setup\btscfg\btscfg.cpp(1769): FAILED hr = c0c025b3

This error pointed to some transaction error, so I downloaded and ran dtctester and it turned out my MSDTC settigns were not good enough. I spend the better part of a day looking for this. What really had me confused was that the SSODB was created fine - the BRE-DB was created fine... and the BizTalkMgmtDb database was sometimes created just fine. I mean... sometimes it would create the BizTalkMgmtDB database and fail during creation of the MessageBox. Other times it would fail on the Management database. So seing as two databases were created just fine, I really didn't think there were any issues with DTC.

BUT, this just goes to show; Before starting a multibox installation of BizTalk, ALWAYS run dtc tester first - just to be sure :-)

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eliasen

Hi all

This isn't about BizTalk, .NET or anything else technical. This is about ME!

The other day I mended a fuse in our car.

Really? you might say.. so what? Well, to me this is a big deal :-) I don't like getting dirty hands - I generally never do anything practical around the house... I am lousy at it, I hate it, and I would rather pay someone else to do it.

But then, the back light on the car stopped working. I changed the light bulbe, which in itself took me about 2 hours, including driving to the gas station to buy a new bulbe... and then it turned out the original bulbe wasn't broken. That sucked! Then I decided I had to take the car to the mechanic... but a friend asked me if I had checked the fuses. Well, duh... off course not - how would I do that? So with the manual in one hand and a screwdriver (YES, a screwdriver... me... a screwdriver...) in the other hand, I found the fuse that wasn't working anymore. I drove, once again, to the gas station, bought a new one (approximately one dollar) and put it into place. And now the back lights are working again.

WOW! What en experience, eh? :-)

So after reading this, you might still think: "Is this guy crazy? All this fuzz about mending a fuse (Thanks to Mads Orbesen Troest for telling me how to say this in English)? YES! It's a bg deal! :-)

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eliasen