Considering the last post concerned loosely coupled orchestrations, I thought it might be useful to demonstrate tightly coupled orchestrations. This method still can promote reuse as orchestrations can be called from multiple sources. We’ll use the same loan process diagram.
And here’s the layout of the master orchestration. In this case we don’t have a Send shape at the end because that’s being handled in the Archive Loan orchestration.
Orchestrations can have a few types of parameters, though I’ve only used message parameters before. Each message parameter is associated with a direction: the parameter can be passed in by value by the calling orchestration, passed out by reference to the calling orchestration, and there’s a ref option to pass in a parameter by reference.
In the PrepareLoan and GenerateLoanDocuments I create a copy of the message and assign a new status value to indicate that something has happened, since I’m not really doing any other work in the orchestration.
As the messages are being passed by reference between one another, there’s no reason for the messages to be written to the Biztalk messagebox, which can be quite a boon to performance.
Source code for this example can be found here.