Document Transformation

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Each industry will probably have a set of schemas to use to communicate between members of the industry. For example, the insurance industry coalition named ACORD (http://www.acord.com) is developing a set of schemas for trading insurance-related documents such as policy applications and claim forms. The travel industry is working on standards for communicating hotel room availability and flight schedules. If you are involved with one of these industries, you should be able to easily read business documents directly from the body of the BizTalk envelope.

One of the themes of this book is doing business across industries. You might receive a purchase order from the automotive industry that has a structure defined by the members of that community. The structure of the purchase order might be completely different from the structure of a purchase order created by the trucking industry or the airline manufacturing industry. Each one of these purchase orders probably has the same basic information, just in a different structure. This approach is completely different from the traditional EDI approach, which required an invoice to have a single structure that you had to adhere to regardless of the information you and your trading partners might need in order to complete your transaction. Your BizTalk server should have the ability to access the information in each one of these documents. You can write programs to transform the automobile industry purchase order into the type of purchase order you use, or you could make it easy on yourself and use XSLT.

As you learned in Chapter 6, for document transformation, creating an XSLT style sheet is much more straightforward than writing a C program because XSLT works directly on the XML input, creating an XML output document that has the structure you need. Think of XSLT as a mapping function that maps certain elements in the input to elements in the output.

A BizTalk server should also be able to match each incoming document with the appropriate transformation map. You can specify this map as part of the trading partner agreement managed by the BizTalk server.

An advanced BizTalk server should also have the ability to create these XSLT transforms in an easy way and allow you to test and update them as needed.