Last year, I presented several sessions on the Integration Monday community, but I never had the chance, for several different reasons, to properly highlight them on my personal blog. The second session I delivered last year was the second part of the topic BizTalk Server: Teach me something new about Flat Files (or not) Part II.
In that session, I tried to address and solve the following questions:
- How to suppress Empty Lines everywhere (end or middle)?
- My positional flat-file contains data that does not match the expected length (and it is not padded with empty spaces). How can I handle that?
- What if we don’t want to remove Headers, but we want to deal with Headers and Trailers?
- Do I always need to create a custom pipeline for dealing with Flat Files? Or is it possible to create a Generic Pipeline?
That was the sixth session that I delivered for that community:
- The first time I presented a session on BizTalk Server Tips & Tricks for Developers and Admins (Deep Dive) (June 22, 2015).
- The second time was Real Case Scenarios Where BizTalk NoS Ultimate Can Improve Our Efficiency (August 31, 2015).
- The third was Creating reusable pieces in Logic Apps (April 18, 2016).
- Followed by BizTalk Mapping Patterns, Best Practices (April 25, 2016).
- And BizTalk Server Teach me something new about Flat Files (or not) (May 22, 2017).
📝 One-Minute Brief
A recap of an Integration Monday session focused on advanced flat‑file processing in BizTalk Server, covering real‑world scenarios such as handling empty lines, headers and trailers, positional mismatches, and deciding between custom and generic pipelines, with video and slides available.
About my session
Session Name: BizTalk Server: Teach me something new about Flat Files (or not) Part II
Session Overview: This is the second part of Sandro Pereira’s earlier presentation on flat files on Integration Monday. You can watch the video recording of the previous session here.
Despite the years, new protocols, formats, or patterns have emerged, such as Web Services, WCF RESTful services, XML, and JSON, among others. The use of text files (Flat Files) in CSV (Comma Separated Values) or TXT, one of the oldest common patterns for exchanging messages, remains today one of the most widely used standards in systems integration and/or communication with business partners.
While tools like Excel can help us interpret such files, this process is always iterative and requires a few user inputs so that the software can determine where to separate the fields/columns and the data type of each field. But for system integration (Enterprise Application Integration), such as BizTalk Server, you must eliminate ambiguity so that these operations can be performed thousands of times with confidence and without having recourse to a manual operator.
You can see the recording session here: BizTalk Server: Teach me something new about Flat Files (or not) Part II.https://youtu.be/pdXsgIyJfmo
About Integration Monday
Integration Monday is full of great sessions that you can watch, and I will also take this opportunity to invite you all to join us next Monday.
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