BizTalk Tips & Tricks

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.