Design your Biztalk 2006 Schema - Part 1

Introduction

Creating a Schema is defining a structure of the data, as similar to creating a table in database. Designing schema plays a vital role for the Integration project. This series of article I am planning to walk through Xml Schema design by giving more samples and pictures in Biztalk 2006.

Base Example

To give you a more common scenario I would take the below shown XML as the base example, from here we explore the changes in each sample.

<ns0:Employees xmlns:ns0="http://CyclicSubs.XmlSchemaEmployee">

<Employee ID="ID_0">

<Name>Name_0</Name>

<Age>Age_0</Age>

<Department>Finance</Department>

</Employee>

</ns0:Employees>

The above sample is the Employees record of a company, contains ID, Name, Age and Department.

Qualified XML

To generate the qualified xml instance out of schema would require few property changes in schema and field level.

Schema level qualified Attribute

Your system receives or the destination system expects the xml message with all attributes are marked with namespaces, design your schema as shown below

Choose Schema Node on the left pane and mark Attribute FormDefault property as "Qualified" (by default its "Unqualified") and your Schema Instance output will be as follows

XML Output

<ns0:Employees xmlns:ns0="http://CyclicSubs.XmlSchemaEmployee">

<Employee ns0:ID="ID_0">

<Name>Name_0</Name>

<Age>Age_0</Age>

<Department>Finance</Department>

</Employee>

</ns0:Employees>

Note: The entire schema attribute fields will be appended with "ns0" namespace (marked as Bold), in our case "ID" is the only attribute in the whole schema.

Schema level qualified Record / Element

Your system receives or the destination system expects the xml message with all elements are marked with namespaces, design your schema as shown below

Choose Schema Node on the left pane and mark Element FormDefault property as "Qualified" (by default its "Unqualified"), reset the Attribute FormDefault property back to "Default" and your Schema Instance output will be as follows

XML Output

<ns0:Employees xmlns:ns0="http://CyclicSubs.XmlSchemaEmployee">

<ns0:Employee ID="ID_0">

<ns0:Name>Name_0</ns0:Name>

<ns0:Age>Age_0</ns0:Age>

<ns0:Department>Finance</ns0:Department>

</ns0:Employee>

</ns0:Employees>

Note: The entire schema element field will be appended with "ns0" namespace (marked as Bold), in our case Name, Age and Employee are the field elements in the whole schema. How the Record "Employee" did append with ns0? In Biztalk term "Employee" is the Record but W3C standard consider it as a Complex element.

Single Qualified Attribute / Element

Can we make only the specific element/attribute as Qualified? Yes it's possible. Choose the specific Element/ Attribute on left pane and mark the "Form" property as "Qualified".

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Note: In the above example Name element under Employee record as marked as "Qualified"

XML Output

<ns0:Employees xmlns:ns0="http://CyclicSubs.XmlSchemaEmployee">

<Employee ID="ID_0">

<ns0:Name>Name_0</ns0:Name>

<Age>Age_0</Age>

</Employee>

</ns0:Employees>

Default and Fixed Value for the Attributes / Elements

Default value

Assume that you receive an Employees message from HR department which has Department element, can be empty for any one. But with in Biztalk you may want to process those employees under department called "UnknownDepartment". This can be easily done by setting the Default Value property of the "Department" element as "UnknownDepartment".

XML Output