Summary
This chapter showed you how to get started in BizTalk messaging by specifying message schemas. We started with structure, which give us the basic tools to create XML schemas. These are by far the most common sorts of schemas for BizTalk messaging. We demonstrated records and fields, which abstract BizTalk schemas away from XML-specific terms such as elements and attributes. An important part of XML Schemas, as specified by the W3C, is type extension, and this chapter showed how BizTalk Editor supports the mechanisms for reuse and extension.
After a discussion of the more common node properties, we proceeded to demonstrate how to compose flat-file schemas. These are used in BizTalk projects chiefly to embrace legacy formats, because they are less flexible and unambiguous than XML-formatted messages.
We rounded out the information we presented in Chapter 2 regarding property promotion to show how that information may be captured in property schemas. We will see these again when we discuss pipelines and custom components. Finally, we demonstrated Microsoft Office InfoPath. The tool illustrated the benefits of open standards for Web development even though both it and BizTalk are proprietary applications. Because both embrace XSD-format schemas, the output of BizTalk Editor easily became the input for InfoPath, and the output of that application will become the point of entry for message instances to BizTalk.