Summary

This chapter describes all the tools and wizards available to you with the BizTalk Orchestration Designer. More importantly, this chapter discusses the concepts you must understand to make meaningful choices when you do use these tools and wizards. This two-pronged approach should enable you to construct properly crafted XLANG schedules.

Having covered the business process drawing earlier in Chapter 9, we started with the implementation of the business process in this chapter. Chapter 9 outlined four areas of focus. This chapter is dedicated to the areas of business process implementation and data flows.

The chapter started with the description of what constitutes a business process implementation. We discussed the four supported implementation technologies. These are compiled COM+ components, script components, MSMQ message queuing, and BizTalk Messaging. This was followed by discussing the concept of ports and port references.

Port references are used to resolve dynamic ports. Each implementation technology has its own peculiarities in how port references and dynamic ports function. We delved into each in turn.

An Action in a running XLANG schedule results in the exchange of messages through ports. When an Action shape in a business process is connected to a port, these message definitions are created. We discussed the XML Communication Wizard and the Method Communication Wizard. These wizards guide the process of defining the messages.

As part of describing the messages in the schedule, we looked at the data types supported in the message and how data flows from field to field can be described in the schedule. Messages can be either synchronous or asynchronous; they can be externally initiated or schedule initiated. We looked at all these cases and what the key differences are.

The message flows associated with a running schedule have ramifications of state management, transaction management, and security. We first explored the issues conceptually and then looked at the port implementation wizards that assist in configuring the implementations correctly. We looked at the COM Component Binding Wizard, Script Component Binding Wizard, Message Queuing Binding Wizard, and BizTalk Messaging Binding Wizard in turn.

The chapter concluded with a review of the basics of developing and running XLANG schedules.