BizTalk™ Unleashed

Parser Design

In this section, we will design a custom parser that we will implement in the next section. To this point, we have covered the architecture of the BizTalk channel in which custom functoids, parsers, and serializers have a role. The preceding section implemented a custom functoid that assumes the data in the channel is already in an XML format. The next two sections will produce that XML format.

A parser operates generally as follows. It accepts from BizTalk a stream of data representing the raw data posted to the channel. The parser inspects the stream to identify whether it is in a format the parser can handle. If so, the parser decides whether the stream contains groups of documents or just a flat sequence of documents. The parser ...