BizTalk Custom Pipeline Components - Framework Overview Part-1

In this article I am trying to put consolidated information for developing custom pipeline components. Hope you like my efforts; frankly, there is nothing new in the article but it's all together.

Receive and Send pipeline performs below basic operations in BizTalk Solution,
- Encrypt outgoing and decrypt income message
- Handle digitally signed messages and verify them
- Validation
- Handling promotion
- Disassembling and assembling coming or processed messages.
- Wrapping header and footer into messages.

The below I have listed components and their jobs in BizTalk Solution.

Pipeline Components	Stages Employed	Tasks
General Component	Decode, Encode, Pre-assemble, Resolve Party or Validate	Take one message process message and produce zero or one message
Disassemble Component	Disassemble	Split message, promote custom properties
Assemble Component	Assemble	Used to wrap message with head or trailer or both
Probe Component	This is not an independent component. Any pipeline component can implement the IProbeMessage interface if it must support message-probing functionality.	Enables the component to check the beginning part of the message

To develop general pipeline component we can use following interfaces. These are coming as part of SDK and BizTalk Solution (BTS).

IBaseComponent Interface
IComponentUI Interface
IComponent Interface
IpersistPropertyBag

IBaseComponent Interface

Members	Usage
Description	Property. Used to specify small description about pipeline component. Description is visible on pipeline properties page at design time.
Name	Property used to specify name of pipeline component. Name is visible on pipeline properties page at design time.
Version	Property used to specify version (example 1.0.0.0) of pipeline component. Visible on pipeline properties page at design time.

IComponentUI Interface

Members	Usage
Icon	Property used to provide icon associated with pipeline component.
Validate	Method. Pipeline designer before pipeline compilation to verify that all configuration properties are correctly set calls this.

IComponent Interface

Members	Usage
Execute	Method. Does specific processing/massaging in inbound message and produces output message to be forwarded to next stages of pipeline or message box.

IpersistPropertyBag

Members	Usage
GetClassID	Method. Retrieves the component's globally unique identifying value.
InitNew	Method. Initializes any objects needed by the component to use the persisted properties.
Load	Method. Used to load property from property bag.
Save	Method. Used to save property-to-property bag.

I will surly come back with more detail articles and implementation with sample code for the subject.

Thanks for visiting my blog and please send your feedback or queries to nilayparikh@gmail.com.

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Have a nice day!