Executing the Business Process

To understand how all the BizTalk Server components work together, the picture looks like this: The file receive function picks up a data file and delivers it to a messaging port through a specific channel. The channel validates the document against an XML specification. The messaging port is tied to an XLANG schedule that begins by processing the source file. With the document inside the XLANG schedule, various business components are called to pass the document as one of their parameters. These components address a variety of business rules, access enterprise databases and legacy systems, send e-mail messages, and generally do anything necessary to accomplish a business process. Components also modify the source document and return these changes back to the XLANG schedule to be passed on to the next action. Finally, the schedule produces an output file that is deposited in a specified output directory.