Chapter 5. The BizTalk Mapper
By Clifford R. Cannon
In This Chapter
Microsoft BizTalk Server provides a standard gateway for sending and receiving documents across the Internet by providing a wide range of services that facilitate the transport and transformation of structured documents and that ensure the data integrity and security of those documents while in transit. To provide the transformation capabilities, BizTalk Server relies on the services of the BizTalk Mapper and an industry standard transformation language known as XSLT.
Maps are created using the BizTalk Mapper and can contain transformations between both industry standard documents such as XML, EDIFACT, or X12 and nonindustry standards such as delimited flat files, positional flat files, or delimited and positional flat files. To construct a map, you use two BizTalk specifications, one for the source specification and one for the destination specification. The Mapper then presents both the source and destination files side-by-side and lets you define the transformations by simply drawing lines between the records, fields, and functoids. A map can include simple value-copy translations, referred to as links, and complex structural manipulations, referred to as functoids. By combining these elements, you can easily map data between a source specification and a destination specification.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
The role of the BizTalk map in transforming data between documents
How to create a BizTalk map to relate fields in the source document to fields in the destination document
How to test a new or modified map, including testing with actual instances of the source document, and testing options
A complete reference to the built-in functoids for data transformation