Gobbledygooks by Richard Hallgren

We ran into an issue today when we had to have an XML comment just below the XML declaration in a message we’re producing in our BizTalk 2006 solution. We needed to produce something like the below.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- Comment goes here -->

Our first approach was to create a map in the send port and to have a custom XSLT template in there that added the comment before the whole transformation process started. We actually got this to work but it meant that we had to have a whole new map with a separate XSLT document in the project!

Eventually we found a property called Xml Asm Processing Instructions (highlighted in the figure – click it to view it in original size) on the XML assembly component (used in the standard XMLTransmit pipeline).

We just put the comment as a value in this property and we were done! No new artifacts or code! Just a weird property – typical BizTalk behavior!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 1:18 pm and is filed under BizTalk 2006.