A while back in my series of articles about testing with BizTalk I covered a technique for testing maps. The background to the approach is still valid in BizTalk 2009, but the technique is improved. To review the previous article refer to the following link:
http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2008/03/30/120851.aspx
In this post although we could do testing of maps, to be honest it was a little bit of a pain. In the newly released BizTalk 2009 CTP there have been some improvements in how you can do some of the testing and I would like to demonstrate this. I will walk through the steps to test your schema.
I will extend on the sample from the previous post about testing schemas. So our solution now looks like the below picture containing an additional schema and a new map.
- Configure your BizTalk Project for Tests
Just to reiterate this step from the previous post you need to ensure the enable unit testing property is set for the BizTalk project.
- Adding references to your test assembly
Again reiterating this step, in your test project you will need to add a couple of references, the main one is the new Microsoft.BizTalk.TestTools assembly which is in the Visual Studio Add Reference list. This will allow you to use these new testing features.
- The test code
In the below picture you can see that I am doing two things. The first is that I create an instance of the new TestableMapBase class which my map derives from. I can use this to execute my map by passing the details of an input file. The results are written to the output file.
I'm also using the schema validation to confirm that the message is valid that comes out. I think there are also properties of the TestableMapBase object which can do this.
In practice when I use this technique I will probably execute the map with a known input file and then compare the results of the output file with a predefined example output file so rather than just validating the schema I'm actually also ensuring the content is exactly as expected. You can do this with a binary comparison of the file.
Summary
As you can see this new technique just simplifies what we had been doing in BizTalk 2006 R2 and is a very nice interface to support this testing.
The sample for this demo is available at the following location: http://www.box.net/shared/yro0poto3m
If you have problems accessing it then let me know.