For the last few weeks, I have been preparing my demos for BizTalk Innovation Day in Norway and Italy, which will occur during September and October, where I will talk about BizTalk Mapping Patterns and Best Practices. Functoids will definitely be one of the topics that I will discuss, and the reason I published a new release of this project was the need for this new functoid for one of my labs.
Sometimes the functoids I create are inspired by real scenarios for the need of my clients, others are requested by community members, and sometimes for playing like this one… but always if I think for some reason that they will be useful in real scenarios. But regardless of the reasons, I am very glad that this project is constantly evolving and already has 23 functoids!
📝 One-Minute Brief
The BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack has been updated for BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013, now featuring 23 custom functoids. The highlight of this release is the Rule Engine Config Get Functoid, which allows developers to pull configuration values and constants directly from the Business Rules Engine (BRE) Vocabularies within a map. This extension simplifies complex mapping patterns and provides a centralized, dynamic way to manage constants without hardcoding values in your maps or XSLT.
Project Description
BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack is a set of libraries with several useful functoids to include and use it in a map, which will provide an extension of BizTalk Mapper capabilities. This is the list of previous functoids available:
What’s new in this version?
In the BizTalk Business Rules Engine, you can define a vocabulary, which is essentially parameters that can be used within the execution of a rules policy. These vocabularies can be accessed from C# code, so the idea here is that you could define constants in a vocabulary that you could deploy to the BRE, which you would then access from a helper class to get your configuration data.
Rule Engine Config Get Functoid
This functoid allows you to obtain a definition value from a Vocabulary in the Business Rules Engine.
Parameters
The functoid takes two mandatory input parameters:
- A string that represents the definition name (e.g., Value1).
- A string that represents the vocabulary name (i.e,. Config).
The output of the functoid is a string with the value of the definition name from a specified vocabulary on the Business Rule Engine: Set dynamic constant using Business Rule Engine.
You can find the advantages and disadvantages of storing configurations in a Vocabulary in the Rules Engine in this post from Michael Stephenson: Where do I store my custom configuration for a BizTalk solution?
Download
You can download the source code and application binaries from GitHub:
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