I am investigating the use of biztalk to send and receive flat files for a project.

Can biztalk deal with flat files without them being converted to xml ?

THANKS

To some extent yes, although it does depend on how much you want to process them. For anything other than trivial it's often easier to turn them into XML and then you have the full range of mapping tools etc. For example we had a case where we needed to deal with an old EDI format. I wrote a custom disassembler to turn it into XML first ( a number of separate files actually) and then processed it.

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Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Thanks Jo - thats the answer I was hoping for.

The system is already in place to process flat files so they just want to be able to send and receive them as is.

The Flat Files are received by an BizTalk adapter associated to a receive location
A pipeline organized in the receive location will be dependable for transforming the Flat File into its equivalent XML,
An orchestration will subscribe to the XML document and this message will go through the business process. While there is no need to have orchestrations in a pure messaging scenario.
BizTalk can send XML messages again as a Flat Files by using another pipeline in the send ports If and when it is necessary, which will be responsible for transforming the XML into its equivalent the Flat File.

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