Arrays in BizTalk Orchestration - Part I

I really don’t know why but I often hear from BizTalk developers that XLANG/s does not support arrays. The truth is that arrays in BizTalk orchestration are not an issue at all. XLANG/s does fully support arrays. More than that, XLANG/s fully supports indexing within arrays.

Here's some links:

"BizTalk Server can consume one dimensional and jagged arrays exposed by Web services that are not BizTalk Web services" (Support for consuming arrays exposed by Web services) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561724.aspx

"XLANG/s supports single-dimensional arrays, but does not support array literals" http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560334.aspx

How to Consume Web Service Arrays: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa559325.aspx

I suppose the reason to this mistaken is because of the following downfalls:

1. You can’t declare typed array (like string[]) variable in the Orchestration editor.
2. You can’t initialize typed array using 'new' keyword (arr = new string[4] is not valid)
3. XLANG/s considers Array as primitive and not as an object. This means you can’t use useful methods and properties like Length (arr.Length is not recognized)

On the other hand, BizTalk 2006 was designed with Xml web services in mind – this means that every serializable object is accessible from inside BizTalk orchestration. If you need to consume a web service that returns array, BizTalk will serialize the web message part into the appropriate CLR object and not just into general System.Array object.

A Great new integration blog

Alex Linder is one of the integration consultants in our company and a very good friend.
He is one of the fewest people I know with a lot knowledge and experience of many integration technologies.
In the past last years he is examining products like Microsoft BizTalk Server, WebSphere Message-Broker and WebSphere MQ to the very edge.

Now he sharing his investigations and tips in his great new blog: http://linderalex.blogspot.com/

It's a great place for all you integration experts so stay tunes – I'm sure I would!

Congratulations Alex.

Publishing BizTalk Orchestration as WCF service

Some issue I encountered when publishing BizTalk Orchestration as WCF service.

After the wizard finished, I tried to browse to the svc file and got the following error:

Type 'System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpHandler' cannot be instantiated under a partially trusted security policy (AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute is not present on the target assembly).

It seems that WCF can't initiate itself with less then full trust policy. To solve this edit the service web.config under <system.web> section with the following entry:

<trust level="Full">

By this you'll grand the service full trust security policy.

Another error is: Receive location for address ".svc" not found. (The BizTalk receive location may be disabled.)

This one means that the target Receive Location in BizTalk administration is not existing (you didn't check the option in the wizard) or it's not enabled.