BobDuckworth62
Programmer
I'll keep going since I am receiving such helpful - and almost instant! - support...
Believe it or not I have actually managed to answer some questions myself, so this is only the tip of the iceberg ;-)
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I am getting a bit ahead of myself here, but I hope I can make clear what I am trying to do as your thoughts would be greatly appreciated...
I need to build an interface that is very dynamic in nature, and this evaluation is designed to give me an idea whether BizTalk is the right tool to use (which it would appear to be from what I have seen so far).
Essentially the interface should consist of a single process that does the same thing every time - it will receive an input "request", go off to a server and get some data, do some transformations, and then call some end-process to finish the task off.
This last bit - the end-process - does need to be specifically coded. Fine.
However, what is going to happen is that the data requested from and returned by the server - and the mapping that is necessary thereafter - is going to vary. Given that the process will remain the same, I believe all of this variety can be managed by plugging in XSDs and XSLTs.
So, what I would like to do is have a single process that examines the content of the incoming request, and then dynamically goes out to find the appropriate input and output XSDs and mapper and uses them in the orchestration to (a) find out what it needs to get from the server (described by attributes of the source XSD), (b) put the returned data into a message described by this XSD, (c) use the dynamically-determined mapper to transform this to the dynamically-determined output XSD and (d) push it on to the end-process.
This sounds like something that should be done using envelope XSDs and the Business Rules Engine, but I haven't got that far yet. Is this a realistic proposition do you think?
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Best regards
Bob
Believe it or not I have actually managed to answer some questions myself, so this is only the tip of the iceberg ;-)
---
I am getting a bit ahead of myself here, but I hope I can make clear what I am trying to do as your thoughts would be greatly appreciated...
I need to build an interface that is very dynamic in nature, and this evaluation is designed to give me an idea whether BizTalk is the right tool to use (which it would appear to be from what I have seen so far).
Essentially the interface should consist of a single process that does the same thing every time - it will receive an input "request", go off to a server and get some data, do some transformations, and then call some end-process to finish the task off.
This last bit - the end-process - does need to be specifically coded. Fine.
However, what is going to happen is that the data requested from and returned by the server - and the mapping that is necessary thereafter - is going to vary. Given that the process will remain the same, I believe all of this variety can be managed by plugging in XSDs and XSLTs.
So, what I would like to do is have a single process that examines the content of the incoming request, and then dynamically goes out to find the appropriate input and output XSDs and mapper and uses them in the orchestration to (a) find out what it needs to get from the server (described by attributes of the source XSD), (b) put the returned data into a message described by this XSD, (c) use the dynamically-determined mapper to transform this to the dynamically-determined output XSD and (d) push it on to the end-process.
This sounds like something that should be done using envelope XSDs and the Business Rules Engine, but I haven't got that far yet. Is this a realistic proposition do you think?
---
Best regards
Bob