Michael Stephenson

Name:

Don't over complicate your map

Description:

I was recently looking at a BizTalk map which had a bug in it and one of the things that I notices was that the developer had strung together a number of functoids to do some logic in the map. We were talking about 12 functoids being used to workout which value should be in the output field.

I think sometimes developers are a little frightened to drop into .net code feeling that it is perhaps not the BizTalk way. In this case the logic could have been executed in a .net assembly with about 4 lines of code and called via the scripting functoid.

I'm not saying that you should not use the out of the box functoids but I think there is a balance where making a very complicated stringing together of functoids should be a trigger to yourself to question if there could be a simpler way to achieve what your trying to do.

Symptoms:

• You may see lots of functoids connected together to map one field
• Your maps might be hard to understand

   

Pain:

• In our case the map had a bug which hadn't been spotted because all cases of the map execution had not been tested. The logic in the different functoid branches was difficult to test
• It is difficult to read the logic of the functoids
• The logic can not be tested in isolation

    

Cure:

• The first thing to do is ensure that you recognize that it is complicated. If this is the case I would recommend asking a colleague to review your map and to see if they find it easy to understand. If they don't then you have some work to do
• By putting the logic in our case in a .net class we could easily test it with some unit tests to ensure the logic is rock solid before it gets anywhere near the map