To wrap up this week’s contributions, tomorrow is a national holiday in Portugal. Meanwhile, the BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack community project for BizTalk Server 2016 has received a new update. Specifically, a new component is now available for custom send pipelines: the Remove XML Namespace Pipeline Component.
📝 One-Minute Brief
Explains how to use the Remove XML Namespace pipeline component from the BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack to strip unwanted XML namespaces at runtime, simplifying message processing, mapping, and downstream system integration.
Remove XML Namespace Pipeline Component
The XML Remove Namespace pipeline component was developed by Johan Hedberg in the old days for BizTalk Server 2006, and I migrated it to BizTalk Server 2016 with his permission. It can be used to remove XML namespaces from XML documents within custom pipelines.
This has the ability to transform the root of the message from this:
<ns0:Blah xmlns:ns0="http://RemoveXmlNamespace.BTS.BlahMessage">
Into this:
<Blah>
As Johan explained in his original post, you generally should not remove namespaces from messages. However, real‑world integrations are rarely perfect. In practice, we often need to deal with legacy systems. Unfortunately, some of them require messages without namespaces for reasons that remain unclear.
To use this pipeline component in your projects, simply copy the RemoveXmlNamespace.PipelineComponents.dll file into the Pipeline Components folder located in the BizTalk Server installation directory:
...\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server <version>\Pipeline Components
Make sure to perform this step on every BizTalk Server in the environment.
You do not need to add a custom pipeline component to be used by the BizTalk Runtime to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC).
What is BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack?
The BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack provides a set of custom pipeline component libraries that enhance BizTalk Server’s standard pipeline features.
In practice, these components work in both receive and send pipelines. Consequently, they streamline message handling and eliminate the need for repetitive custom implementations.
The project is available on the BizTalk Server Open Source Community repository on GitHub (https://github.com/BizTalkCommunity), and everyone can contribute new pipeline components to extend or improve existing BizTalk Server capabilities.
At the moment, it is only available for BizTalk Server 2016, but it will soon be compiled and available for previous versions of the product.
Download
You can download BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack from GitHub:
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