Jan Tielens' Bloggings

BizTalk Server 2004 has some basic built-in functionalities for dealing with stuff that can go wrong, for example retries on an adapter for which you can specify the retry delay and retry count. But in many cases when you’re working with custom components, mappers, etc. on an Orchestration, you want to be able to catch exceptions. BizTalk has a shape which you can use for this, but before we’re going to take a look at it, let’s think about what we want to do if something goes wrong. Suppose you want to create a message containing information about the exception and send that message to a send port, additionally we want to include the message that caused the exception. And of course it would be nice if all of this stuff would be reusable in other BizTalk projects.

Owen Allen (MS E-Business Technologies) has updated my list of File Send Handler Macros, thanks Owen!

A Basic Introduction to Messaging with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004
By: Christof Claessens

Since the Service Pack 1 Preview of InfoPath it is really simple to fill for example a drop-down list box on a InfoPath form with data that is stored in a SharePoint list. But it’s not quite straight forward to fill that drop-down list box with all the users of a SharePoint site. Although this is quite easy to accomplish in a custom SharePoint list by creating a Lookup column and indicating that you want to get User Information. But (almost) nothing is impossible with InfoPath, so let’s give it a try!

UPDATED HERE!!

The InfoPath Service Pack1 adds some nice features to InfoPath, there a few that I really like. One of them is the ability to use a SharePoint list as a data source. For example if you have a contact list in SharePoint containing information about your customers, you can easily create a drop-down list box on an InfoPath form, that automatically gets filled with a list of your customers. That’s already nice, but in some cases you may want to fill other fields on your form, based on the selected item of your drop-down list box. For example: you want to display the address of the selected customer on your InfoPath form. This involves a little bit of plumbing code which can be done either in .NET code (by using the InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio.NET) or in Java/VB-script. So because not everyone lives in a managed world today, let’s do it in good old VB-script! (sometime I’m a little bit old fashioned…)

First of all create a new InfoPath Form. Then put a drop-down list box on your form, double-click on it so we can set the properties. In the “List box entries” section of the properties window, select “Look up values in a data connection to a database, Web Service, file or SharePoint library or list”. When you click the Add-button a wizard shows up which allows you to easily choose a data source. First select of course “SharePoint library or list”, then enter the URL of the SharePoint site that contains the list you want to use. The wizard will retrieve all the lists and libraries on your site, in our example we’ll choose the Contacts list. In the next window you can choose which fields of that list you want to use, make sure you’ve selected the Address and City fields and finish the wizard. Further on the properties window you can choose the XPath expression for the Entries property. By clicking the button right of the Entries textbox, you can easily navigate to the Contacts node. For the Value and Display name properties you can choose something meaningful, for example the Company field. Now if you preview this form, the drop-down list box already contains a list of your customers!

It's all about BizTalk today! If you've missed one of the impressive Webcast series covering BizTalk 2004 last week, they are already available online (via Scott Woodgate):