BizTalk - The way I see it! – Part 3: BizTalk artifacts
In the previous posts, I talked about BizTalk Server Architecture after a brief introduction.
Today, I’ll talk about BizTalk artifacts covering the following points,
· Schemas
· Maps
· Orchestration
· Adapter
· Pipeline
Schemas (or XSD)
A schema is the standard way to describe XML document structure. BizTalk cannot deal with Xml documents (messages) without their XSD (unless you’re using these messages in a non-xml format)
To cut a long story short, XSD to xml is like a Class to its instance
Maps
Since BizTalk is used to integrate more than one system (definitelyJ), and given that different systems uses different schemas, so there gotta be something to “map” these different schemas to each other.
So, Maps are used to transform one schema to another. If you guys are familiar with XSLT, you should know exactly what I’m talking about.
Orchestration
Short definition: executable business process, you can consider it as a workflow (for now)
Longer definition: we need 2 posts (at least) to cover this; however this is already in my plan for the upcoming posts, God willing.
Adapter
When integrating with a system (say SQL Server), BizTalk should know how to send requests and receive responses to this system (such as select statements, executing stored procedures, etc...). That’s why we need adapters, to convert XML (BizTalk format) to some System format and the way back.
Pipeline
As we have seen in previous post, In case BizTalk receives a message, the message is processed by the adapter; it goes thru a pipeline which does the following:
1. Decode: Decrypts or decodes the message data
2. Disassemble: Disassembles an interchange into smaller messages and parses message contents
3. Validate: Validates the message data, generally against a schema
4. Resolve Party: Identifies the BizTalk Server party associated with some security token in the message or message context
However, all of these steps are not mandatory; some of them will function according to the configured pipeline.
For example, XML receive pipeline (BizTalk out of the box), only does the validation step (step 3).
See you next post with “Developing Schemas Using BizTalk”