BizTalk 101 - Back to Basics

Show Me the Code

I don’t know about you, but having been working with code most of my life, I seem to think better when looking at code. Working with the orchestration designer is great, but when you have a complex orchestration, with a bunch of loops, decisions, and expression shapes with a few lines of code in them, it’s hard to get a grip on exactly what’s happening in the orchestration. Wouldn’t it be great to get a view of the orchestration, as it would look in code, with all the loop conditions, decision rules, and expression shape code included. It’s pretty easy to do actually!

1. Select your orchestration file in the Solution Explorer.
2. Create a copy of it (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V).
3. Select the copy and change the .odx to .cs, (select Yes in the warning box).
4. Open the CS file in Visual Studio
5. There you go!

(You should exclude this rogue C# file from your project before you build!)

Here’s an example of a message re-sequencer I am working on, I chopped out all the DesignerPosition attributes so it’s a bit cleaner, this is the body method:

body ()
{
    activate receive (OrderRcvPort.Operation_1, OrderInMsg, initialize SupplierIDCorrSet);
    messageStore = new MessageUtils.MessageStore();
    sequenceID = 1;
    checkStore = true;
    sequenceComplete = false;
    while (sequenceID < 6)
    {
        if (OrderInMsg.SequenceID == sequenceID)
        {
            send (OrderSndPort.Operation_1, OrderInMsg);
            sequenceID = sequenceID + 1;
        }
        else
        {
            messageStore.AddMessage (OrderInMsg.SequenceID, OrderInMsg);
        }
        checkStore = true;
        while (checkStore)
        {
            if (messageStore.MessageInStore (sequenceID))
            {
                construct OrderFromStoreMsg
                {
                    OrderFromStoreMsg = messageStore.GetMessage (sequenceID);
                }
                send (OrderSndPort.Operation_2, OrderFromStoreMsg);
                sequenceID = sequenceID + 1;
            }
            else
            {
                checkStore = false;
            }
        }
        if (sequenceID < 6)
        {
            receive (OrderRcvPort.Operation_1, OrderInMsg, SupplierIDCorrSet);
        }
    }
}

The temptation to re-name an .odx file to .cs, modify the orchestration using code, then re-name it back could prove too great. It sounds dangerous, (don’t try this at work), I’ll let you know how I get on…

Print | posted on Friday, August 20, 2004 9:43 PM |