Solidsoft

Flat File Processing Gotcha

Duncan Millard — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:07:00 GMT

Flat file parsing in BTS2006 is pretty nice in general - you get a very specific error back in the error log if your incoming file is in the wrong format for the schema (or, put a more likely way, if you have buggered up creating the schema).

However, this vague error stumped us for a little while:

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Orders.ContoFFPipeline.ContoFF, Orders.ContoFFPipeline, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=d5d6f7acdeb815af" Source: "Flat file disassembler" Receive Port: "RcvEnvelopedDocument" URI: "C:\FFIN\*.TXT" Reason: Unrecognized data in remaining stream

In our case this was due to a rogue carriage return at the end of the file (we had two instead of one!). Hope this saves someone some time!

Nice little BizTalk 2006 Mapper Feature

Duncan Millard — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 13:08:00 GMT

Today's tip is brought to you via the BizTalk 2006 Deep Dive training course that I'm on, run by Alan Smith of the Bloggers' Guide to BizTalk fame..

In BizTalk 2004, if you wanted to create an empty output element in your target document via the mapper, you had a couple of options. You could either use a string concat functoid with one empty input parameter, or use a value mapper with 'true' and an empty string as its inputs. Bit tacky really, and in the case of a string concat also a bit slow as it uses inline C#.

Well rejoice, for in BizTalk 2006 there's a new drop-down option on the "Value" field of the mapper that lets you pick "".

Lovely! Especially handy if you are using the little-known but amazingly handy Property Demotion technique to populate message fields on the way out.

Incidentally, further to the system context properties described in the link above, you can also demote your own promoted properties from your own custom schema back into your message in the send pipeline.

Handy XPath Expression Testbed

Duncan Millard — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:17:00 GMT

Ever wanted to quickly and easily try out different XPath expressions on your documents?

Just click this link!