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A week ago, I had a problem with a Flat File Schema in BizTalk 2010. I thought I was doing everything right, but I forgot one important thing.

Below you can find the flat file we have to create a schema for.

So we have two type of lines, a name-line (starts with N) and a address-line (starts with A).

In the schema there should be a sequence with N and A repeating and A can occur 0 to many times.

So I made a schema looking like this:

The minOccurs and maxOccurs set to this:

N: 0 – 1

A: 0 – unbounded

The Tag Identifier is also set to ‘N ‘ for element Name and to ‘A ‘ for the element Address.

When I try to ‘Validate Instance’ in Visual Studio I get the error:

Unexpected data found while looking for: ‘A ‘

The solution to this error was to set the Parser Optimization to Complexity.

When the Parser Optimization is set to ‘speed’, which is the default value, the schema is optimized to decrease the parsing time. This is no problem for the most flat files, but for complex flat files it can be a problem.

So setting the value to ‘complexity’ can help your flat file schema parse complex flat files.

More info about the Parse Optimization property on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578137.aspx

You want to make a custom BizTalk pipeline component that handles content from an inbound XML-message, e.g. getting a value with XPath. Then you could use a MemoryStream or load the message in an XmlDocument. This is not the most performant way for doing this, though. Loading the message into memory with an XMLDocument, can take up to 10 times of the amount of space than the actual message size.

If you want to make a pipeline component that has a good performance, you might want to use an Xml(Text)Reader, a ReadOnlySeekableStreem or a VirtualStream. This doesn’t load the message entirely into memory.

In order to do this, you will need the assembly Microsoft.BizTalk.Streaming.dll.

You can find this assemby in the GAC and get it by executing this in cmd.exe:

cd C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.BizTalk.Streaming\3.0.1.0__31bf3856ad364e35
xcopy Microsoft.BizTalk.Streaming.dll "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010"

For an example you can check out this post:

http://blog.codit.eu/post/2011/10/15/XslTransform-pipeline-component.aspx

For more info about the VirtualStream and it’s advantages, you can take a look at this topic:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee377071(v=bts.10).aspx