Enterprise Service Bus Part Six

Sam Gentile has posted the sixth part in his Enterprise Service Bus series. This installment covers ESB channel models.

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Switching to XSLT for Mapping

I have had enough and I am not going to take it anymore. I am tired of spending hours and hours fighting with the visual mapping tool only to discover that no combination of links and functoids will create the mapping output I need. Instead of using the visual mapper, I will instead be creating all of my BizTalk maps using XSLT scripts. What has taken hours to get working using the visual mapper can be built in a fraction of the time by writing a script. In many cases there is no way to get the visual mapper to handle complicated looping and the only option is using a custom XSLT script. The past few weeks I have been scripting out more and more of my maps and each time I kick myself for not pursuing this technique sooner.

The only downside to this technique is that it requires somebody fluent in XSLT and functional programming to create and maintain the maps. This pretty much eliminates the possibility of having a non-developer maintaining maps. As a consultant, it means I have to be sure to perform the necessary knowledge transfer to a client resource so that they can continue to maintain their maps after I have moved on to a new assignment. I think I can live with that.

If you are tired of fighting with the visual mapper I highly suggest you look into creating maps using custom XSLT scripts. Once you get used to it, I guarantee you will not want to go back to using clunky visual interface ever again.

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