Gobbledygooks by Richard Hallgren

I’ve doing a lot of EDI related work in BizTalk lately and I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed it! EDI takes a while to get used to (see example below), but once one started to understand it I’ve found it to be a real nice, strict standard – with some cool features built into BizTalk!

UNB+IATB:1+6XPPC+LHPPC+940101:0950+1'
UNH+1+PAORES:93:1:IA'
MSG+1:45'
IFT+3+XYZCOMPANY AVAILABILITY'
ERC+A7V:1:AMD'
IFT+3+NO MORE FLIGHTS'
ODI'
TVL+240493:1000::1220+FRA+JFK+DL+400+C'
...

There are however some things that doesn’t work as expected …

Promoting values

According to the MSDN documentation the EDI Disassembler by default promotes the following EDI fields: UNB2.1, UNB2.3, UNB3.1, UNB11; UNG1, UNG2.1, UNG3.1; UNH2.1, UNH2.2, UNH2.3.

There are however situation where one would like other values promoted.

I my case I wanted the C002/1001 value in the BGM segment. This is a value identifying the purpose of the document and I needed to route the incoming message based on the value.

The short version is that creating a property schema, promoting the field in the schema and having the EDI Disassembler promoting the value will not work (as with the XML Disassembler). To do this you’ll need to use a custom pipeline component to promote the value. Rikard Alard seem to have come to the same conclusion here.

Promote pipeline component to use

If you don’t want to spend time on writing your own pipeline component to do this yourself you can find a nice “promote component” on CodePlex here by Jan Eliasen.

If you however expect to receive lots and lots of big messages you might want to look into changing the component to use XPathReader and custom stream implementations in the Microsoft.BizTalk.Streaming.dll. You can find more detailed information on how to do that in this MSDN article.

Update 2010-04-13
Grant Samuels commented and made me aware of the fact that inline scripts might in some cases cause memory leaks. He has some further information here and you’ll find a kb-article here. 

I’ve posted a few times before on how powerful I think it is in complex mapping to be able to replace the BizTalk Mapper with a custom XSLT script (here’s how to). The BizTalk Mapper is nice and productive in simpler scenarios but in my experience it break down in more complex ones and maintaining a good overview is hard. I’m however looking forward to the new version of the tool in BizTalk 2010 – but until then I’m using custom XSLT when things gets complicated.

Custom XSLT however lacks a few things once has gotten used to have – such as scripting blocks, clever functoids etc. In some previously post (here and here) I’ve talked about using EXSLT as a way to extend the capabilities of custom XSLT when used in BizTalk.

Bye, bye external libraries – heeeello inline scripts

Another way to achieve much of the same functionality even easier is to use embedded scripting that’s supported by the XslTransform class. Using a script block in XSLT is easy and is also the way the BizTalk Mapper makes it possible to include C# snippets right into your maps.

Have a look at the following XSLT sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet
    version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"
    xmlns:code="http://richardhallgren.com/Sample/XsltCode"
    exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl code"
    >
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
        <Test>
            <UniqueNumber>
                <xsl:value-of select="code:GetUniqueId()" />
            </UniqueNumber>
            <SpecialDateFormat>
                <xsl:value-of select="code:GetInternationalDateFormat('11/16/2003')" />
            </SpecialDateFormat>
            <IncludesBizTalk>
                <xsl:value-of select="code:IncludesSpecialWord('This is a text with BizTalk in it', 'BizTalk')" />
            </IncludesBizTalk>
        </Test>
    </xsl:template>

    <msxsl:script language="CSharp" implements-prefix="code">
        //Gets a unique id based on a guid
        public string GetUniqueId()
        {
            return Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
        }

        //Formats US based dates to standard international
        public string GetInternationalDateFormat(String date)
        {
            return DateTime.Parse(date, new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US")).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");
        }

        //Use regular expression to look for a pattern in a string
        public bool IncludesSpecialWord(String s, String pattern)
        {
            Regex rx = new Regex(pattern);
            return rx.Match(s).Success;
        }
    </msxsl:script>
</xsl:stylesheet>

All one has to do is to define a code block, reference the xml-namespace used and start coding! Say goodbye to all those external library dlls!

It’s possible to use a few core namespaces without the full .NET namespace path but all namespaces are available as long as they are fully qualified. MSDN has a great page with all the details here.