Business Objects and BizTalk

Tom Nedwek posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007

I and a project I just joined are both new to CSLA (.NET 2.0) and BizTalk (Server 2006 R2). As we start designing data transformations/interchanges in BizTalk, I would like to map to and from business objects ... let them handle the data access themselves, thus insulating the transformation process from the underlying datastore. The whole idea of making BizTalk aware of things like tables and columns leaves me cold.

First: does this make sense in the real world?

Second: what are the best practices around this? One thing I've seen is that our data access code currently includes connection creation and destruction with every insert, update, and delete ... fine from a Web page, but not so good for thousands of batched inserts or updates. Do I just need to add alternative "batch" versions of these methods (with appropriate transactional control), or is there more to the puzzle?

Thanks.

Tom Nedwek replied on Friday, October 26, 2007

Putting together conversations with Microsoft and previous posts from Rocky, the best practice seems to be

• Wrap business functionality in web services that utilize CSLA-based business objects
  (which will effectively isolate Biztalk from the underlying datastore)
• Create schemas to be used to pass data into and out of these services (as opposed to creating strongly typed service methods)
• Use XSD.EXE to create XMLSerializable classes to support these schemas.