Processing soap envelope within BizTalk Server

BizTalk parsing engine supports envelope schemas. This means that if the incoming message is marked as envelope schema, the parsing engine will parse the message and will dispatch the body content of the envelope as the message body part.

The most common scenario is when BizTalk receives SOAP Envelop. It's little known that Microsoft supplies soap envelope XSD schema as part of BizTalk system schemas. The schema name is BTS.soap_envelope_1__1 and is deployed inside Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas.dll under BizTalk.System BTS application.

When schema is marked as Envelope (is_envelope="yes"), the engine is looking for the body_xpath annotation. This value is the actual data section and will be assigned as the message part. The value of body_xpath attribute is saved in dbo.bt_DocumentSpec table of BizTalkMgmtDb database. In the disassembling process the engine is extracting the value by using IDocumentSpec.GetBodyPath() under Microsoft.BizTalk.Component.Interop namespace.

Then the engine performing denormalize process by extracting message data from the body element. At the end of the process, BTS.MessageType context property is set to the message type of actual content of the soap:Body section.

How do I start an Orchestration with soap:envelope message type

Normally, Orchestration subscription includes value for BTS.MessageType context property, this mean you can't start orchestration with the soap envelope message type because the XmlDisassembler Component will discard the soap:Envelope content and the messaging engine will only get the soap:Body content – so at the end of the process, BTS.MessageType context property will be set to the actual message type of content under soap:Body section and the orchestration will never start with the type soap:Envelope.

In case you need to process the entire soap:Envelope inside orchestration:

• Use PassThruReceive pipeline.
• Define message of type BTS.soap_envelope_1__1 message inside the orchestration (Message Type > schemas > from referenced assembly > Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas).
• Use Xml Document as the incoming message.
• Assign the incoming Xml Document message to the BTS.soap_envelope_1__1 message.

Which custom pipeline component I need to develop for extracting the soap:Body section

If you need to receive message that is wrapped by a soap envelope and you're using the XmlDisassembler pipeline component - there's no need to develop further components for extracting the body element because the engine will automatically dispatch the soap:Body as the message part.

What about soap:Header and soap:Fault section

The automatic dispatch is only for the soap:Body section and the other section are discarded. so if you also need to process the soap:Header section you have to write a custom pipeline component for this task.

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.