Biztalk Xslt Interview Preparation Guide

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When a developer faces a complex mapping (problem) and to solve it requires a substantial amount of logic he/she can use custom XSLT.

Yes. It can be done by adding a criterion to the select attribute in the <xsl:for-each> element.Filter operators which can be used are:
☛ =(equal)
☛ != (not equal)
☛ < less than
☛ > greater than

A filter on the Send Port is the first step to enable subscriptions in BizTalk.

A “Message Assignment” shape is used to create a new message and assign values to it. A Expression shape is used to assign values to variables and also write ‘if’ conditions.

This property defines the degree of isolation between the state changes performed by different atomic transactions. This is not applicable for Long-Running transactions. BizTalk supports three isolation levels. These are ‘Read Committed’, ‘Repeatable Read’ and ‘Serializable’. The last one being the default value.

Adapters can simply be termed as medium with which BizTalk communicates with other software, processes, and information together.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a collection of tools that allow you to manage aggregations, alerts, and profiles to monitor relevant business metrics (called Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs). It gives you end-to-end visibility into your business processes, providing accurate information about the status and results of various operations, processes, and transactions so you can address problem areas and resolve issues within your business.

The BAM Framework provides an easy, real-time, transaction-consistent way to monitor heterogeneous business applications, and to present data for SQL queries and aggregated reports (OLAP). Through queries and aggregations, you can include not only the data that is present during the running business process, but also the state and the dynamics of the running business process, independent of how the business is automated.

XSLT or Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations is a style sheet language for XML documents (stands for XSL Transformations), it defines the transformation rules of the messages.

When a group of correlated messages could potentially be received at the same time, a race condition could occur in which a correlation set in a particular orchestration instance must be initialized by one of the messages before the other messages can be correlated to that orchestration instance. To ensure that all of the correlated messages will be received by the same orchestration instance, BizTalk detects the potential for such a race condition and treats these messages as a convoy.

Convoy is a term which we use to describe a class of application protocols, specifically it is a set of application protocols which have a race condition as described above. Let’s take an example. Say you are a hospital and want to have a service which handles all information about each patient. For a given patient you have three types of messages, an admittance message, status messages, and a discharge message.

If you look at your protocol, you will have built a service which just receives. Now let’s think about what could happen. Let’s say you send the patient admittance message and it goes through the system using maybe a synchronous protocol like HTTP. That means when you get the 202 back, you know the message has been delivered. But what if the BizTalkServer host which is actually supposed to process the message hasn’t started yet (i.e. the NT service is stopped). Maybe you had a power outage, maybe some intern decided to “hit this button”, who knows.

So the orchestration instance which is supposed to handle all messages for patient X has not physically started. The message is in the database (MessageBox) and if you look in HAT you will see the orchestration is marked as ready to run, but it can’t start cause there is nowhere for it to start.

☛ A Compensation section is generally written, in order to UNDO the effect of a transaction.
☛ The Compensation section for a scope gets activated only when the scope terminates normally or the scope completes its execution.
☛ Unlike exceptions, a compensation section can be written for a “Atomic” as well as a “L-R”
☛ A Compensation section needs to be explicitly invoked, using the Compensation Shape in order for it to execute.
☛ A Compensation section for a scope does NOT automatically undo the effect of a transaction. The compensation section must have the undo logic in place in order to have such an effect.
☛ A Compensation shape can be used to invoke/execute a compensation section. The control returns to the next operation after compensation shape, once the execution of the compensation section is complete.
☛ Is it possible to share variables across two branches in a Parallel shape
yes it is possible you just need to set the “Synchronized” property to true.