Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

4.4. Developing a Custom Pipeline Component

For some scenarios, it's necessary to create your own pipeline components. Sometimes this may mean creating your own component from scratch or creating a wrapper around an existing pipeline component to provide some additional functionality. For example, the BizTalk Swift accelerator has its own disassembler and assembler. Under the covers, these components invoke the BizTalk flat-file disassembler and assembler, layering some additional functionality on top. The disassembler, for example, catches all exceptions and promotes message context properties to enable failed messages to be routed so that they can go to a portal and be repaired. This ability to route failed messages is now provided by the engine in the BizTalk 2006 release, as mentioned earlier in the chapter.

This is a very interesting design, and I would encourage you to take a look. The portal allows the badly formatted message to be opened in InfoPath forms, repaired, and then resubmitted to BizTalk to continue its processing.

If you need to develop a custom pipeline component, the first question to ask yourself should be, "Do my requirements extend any existing pipeline components?" If they do, it's worth considering extending an existing component before jumping in to develop a new component from scratch. There are many advantages to extending the existing components, including reduced time to develop your scenario. In addition, you will be leveraging code that is heavily ...