Hi,

Someone sent me an email directly about a mapping issue which I mistook for an email alert from my subscription to this forum, so I deleted it but then found nothing on the forum. Therefore, apologies for not replying to the email (was it from you, reddynet?).

Anyway, the problem was where BizTalk Mapper did not give an error, but running a document through the channel produced an error message, stating that an element could not be empty or something like that.

I have found this inconsistency between Mapper and the channel before, and it has always been where the mapping has created an instance of the [u]Destination</u> document that does not meet its specification. The error message in this case suggests that a mandatory element has not been created by the mapping.

Run the test mapping in Mapper again, looking at the output tab for any missing fields that ought to be there. Compare the output with sample output generated from the BizTalk Editor for the destination document specification.

If you can't see anything obvious there, you can go into the BizTalk Administration utility, find your document in the Suspended Queue and right-click on it to select the "View Document" option. From the resulting (and annoyingly small) window that does not word-wrap, you can copy the document data into NotePad and save it as a document instance which you can then validate against the destination document specification via BizTalk Editor.

However, if your destination document is a non-XML format such as EDIFACT, you may find that the "View Document" option shows you the internal XML representation of the document, rather than the native format. In this case, you are back to looking at the XML representation of the document for a missing field. If you have BizTalk Server 2002, the Editor will allow you to create an XML instance from a non-XML specification, which you can use for comparison with the XML representation of the error document from the channel.

And yes, it is going to waste a lot of your time, which could have been saved if the missing element name had simply been reported in the error message. Perhaps BTS 2004 will be more helpful?

Hope this helps,

Ramin

Ramin,
If you change a map (or a document) after referencing it in a channel then you have to refresh the channel again else the changes won't be reflected ( i faced this problem earlier & did this). Simplest way to refresh is open the channel -> click next, next & finish.

Pradeep Murti

Hi Pradeep,

It is true that you need to refresh the channel when you change a document or mapping, however I don't think that was the cause of the problem that was initially emailed to me.

BTW, if you have BTS 2002 you can also use the new BizTalk Refresh Messaging Manager Tool to refresh documents, envelopes and channels much more quickly. The utility is "...\Microsoft BizTalk Server\SDK\Messaging Samples\Refresh Messaging Manager\BTM_Refresh.exe". It saves a lot of time when you change something that is used in several places.

Ramin