In this article you can find some of the tips & tricks ,best practices learned and applied during my career experience.I hope readers will find them useful and I am happy to get any comment/feedback & objections on any of my posting.Thanks & Happy BizTalking.
1. BizTalk Best Practices
Always use multipart messages in Orchestration
o If schema changes (replacing with new schema), no need to change the orchestration send/receive.
o Practical approach – if the schema is changed, delete the part from the multipart message. Lot of time saved. No needs to touch receive/send shapes & receive/send logical port.
· Always use Direct Binding
o Messages are always processed using subscriptions. So, how does it matter?
o Loosely coupling.
o Reusable orchestrations
· Always use Canonical Schema (Separate Internal & External Schemas)
o One single canonical schema can have everything in it .Ex: Order schema can have all the order details at one place. Anybody and everybody can refer to the same schema to pull out any data.
o Flexible. If partner schema changes, only corresponding Map needs change. Orchestration unaffected.
o Generic Orchestrations can be created with canonical schema.
· Always Deploy at Solution Level in VS ,rather than project Level
o Automatic build/deploy of dependencies.
· Always use straight forward Maps either in Receive/Send port. Only if there are multi level input/output mappings and message constructions are needed within the orchestration.
o No need to update Orchestration, if schema changes.
o Alternative - ESB (dynamic mapping -My personal choice)
· Never expose Orchestration as Web/WCF service. Always expose schemas to the caller
o Loosely coupling
o Changing orchestration without breaking the caller.
· Always use relative paths for Config & Key files
o Avoids source control build issues!
o Practically – relative path “../” means one folder up, generally from the bin folder or in BizTalk bin/development folder.
· Debug XSLT used in Maps separately using VS Debugger.
o Maps are not debugger friendly
o Input can be validated against the mapping rules and helps to fix any mapping error prior to deployment.
2. Some useful BizTalk Tips
To Debug XSLT
· Validate the Map
· Open the xslt generated from the validate map (generally in C:\Users\<Porifle>\AppData\Local\Temp\_MapData\ folder)
· Right click – View source
· Set Break points
· Set input XML document, which you want to use to validate the Map, in the properties
· set the output XML path. This will be result generated once the debug is complete.
· Menu – XML – Debug XSLT
· Verify the output document – check you have got everything u needed.
· If any error, you will be shown them in the Output window.
· That’s it done.
Direct Binding Orchestration
My Ideal way of creating Orchestrations.
· Receive shape direct binding message box
· Send shape in direct binding message box
· Receive shape can have filters – such as Receive Port/Location Name or any other promoted properties
· Send port can have filters such as Message Type
3.Useful Information on BizTalk
Schema versioning
· Multiple versions of the same schema (same message type = root node +namespace & same dll name, but different version such as 1.0.0.0 /2.0.0.0) can be deployed in the same server .But; the latest version will be picked up by the BizTalk.
MinOccurs vs. Nillable (Optional vs. Not Required)
· Optional -field doesn’t need to be present in the XML.
· Required
· Not Optional
· Not Required - field doesn’t need to have a value.
Possible combinations:
· Optional + Not Required
· Optional + Required
· Not Optional + Not Required
· Not Optional + Required
MinOccurs = 0 means optional.
Nillable = “true” means not required.
String data types are Nillable by default
Other types – integer, bool, date, time etc are required by default – to make it not required set Nillable = “true”
BizTalk Orchestration Profiler – tool to get the coverage on the orchestration tracking. Used to identify long running shapes, low latency issues .gives number of instances run over a period of time and the coverage at shape level.
BizTalk Documenter – Tool to create documents in chm /word format with the BizTalk artefacts details in the assembly.
XSDObjectGen.msi – Generates .NET class of schema equalent.similar to xsd.exe.
4.BizTalk – Don’ts
· using XmlDocument in custom pipeline component . XmlDocument consumes more memory.Use streaming instead.
· using external schema directly in internal mapping & processing . maintain equivalent internal schema will reduce lot of rework even if the external schema undergo changes.
