BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices

Sandro Pereira has written a cool e-book about mapping, I recommend getting a free copy.

The BizTalk Mapping Patterns and Best Practices book is a reference guide mainly intended for BizTalk developers to make their day-to-day lives easier. The book offers insights on how maps work, the most common patterns in real time scenarios, and the best practices to carry out transformations. The author has been working on this over the last one year, and his original idea of publishing these information as a blog changed in the due course to become a white paper, then finally to a “Community eBook” with about 400-pages and contributions from so many people.

 

 

Download it now from here please download now for free.

NOTE: The download link will link you to the BizTalk 360 website for the download, however after I was added to a dozen junk mail mailing lists following this registration, I would really recommend NOT using this site. Please refer to my blog post about BizTalk360. 

UPDATE: Sadly they have moved the object so you have to go through this process, please be aware of lots of junk mail following this.

Fixed Field Settings on Map

On a map, you can set the value of a destination node to a fixed value, from within the mapper, simply by setting the value property when clicking the destination node on the right hand side schema. I’ve see people use the string functiods to pre-set a value, however you do not need to do this.

There is a catch I found in BizTalk 2009. If you set the fixed value on a map page other than the first page, it does not set, worse yet, if that field on the destination schema happens to be a promoted property, it does not promote the value, and will fail when you try and use the value inside your orchestration as desired.

You will not know why, the shape will just fail, with some weird exception.

Always use the first page.