Was promoted

Ever wanted to know in a send pipeline if a property was promoted before? The BizTalk API comes with an object called ‘ContextPropertyType’ which you can use for this purpose.

I have a very simple schema and corresponding instance:

Above message travels through BizTalk using the following path:

receive port -> orchestration -> send port

I defined the ‘Firstname’ element as promoted property to have it promoted by the out-of-the-box XmlReceive pipeline. After that the message is sent to the message box and picked up by the orchestration to do some processing. Next the orchestration will send the message to the message box again using a send shape. Finally the send port picks up the message and sends it to some URI using an adapter.

In the send port I used a custom pipeline containing a pipeline component with this code:

 After the message has been picked up by the send port the messaging engine will alter the context of the message. The ‘Firstname’ element that was promoted before is not promoted anymore now. To prove this I call the IsPromoted method for the specific property (see code above).

So what if you want to know if the property was promoted before? This is where the ContextPropertyType object comes in. Together with the ‘GetPropertyType’ method on the context object I’m able to find the status of the property.

Running this example shows the following output in DebugView:

 As you can see the PropertyType has a value equal to ContextPropertyType.WasPromoted. In the above sample I used an orchestration in the middle but the same will also apply to messaging only scenarios.

Although I recently made use of this API while implementing a very simple repair and resubmit feature, there might not be so many real world scenarios where one would use this. At least I couldn’t think of many. (Suggestion? Ping me, please.).  Also be aware that is an undocumented feature for which the BizTalk help states it is for internal use only. This basically means Microsoft will not guarantee any backward compatibility for this when new versions or SPs are released.