Using Envelope Schema in Biztalk

What is Envelope Schema: An envelope schema is a special type of XML schema. Envelope schemas are used to define the structure of XML envelopes, which are used to wrap one or more XML business documents into a single XML instance message. When you define an XML schema to be an envelope schema, a couple of additional property settings are required, depending on such factors as whether there are more than one root record defined in the envelope schema

As most of you aware of the fact that you can either

• Split a single message into multiple messages using Receive pipeline.
• Append multiple mesages into a single message using a Send Pipeline

In both the cases you would need to use an "Envelope Schema" to group them together. Following are instructions how to configure the Envelope schema to achieve the above processes.

Splitting a single message into multiple messages:
You need to create an Orders envelope schema, and Order document schema for that.

Steps:

1. Create a new BizTalk project
2. Add the Order document schema with OrderId and Date elements
3. Add the Orders envelope schema with only root element Orders
4. Click on the Schema node and set its "Envelope" property to true
5. Click on the Orders node, and click on the body xPath property, choose Orders and click ok.
6. Deploy the project
7. Create a receive location and choose XmlReceive pipeline
8. Open the pipeline properties dialog, and set envelope schema to the Orders schema, and document schema to Order schema

Append multiple messages into a single message: You need to create an Orders envelope schema, and Order document schema for that.

Steps:

1. Create a new BizTalk project
2. Add the Order document schema with OrderId and Date elements
3. Add the Orders envelope schema with only root element Orders
4. Click on the Schema node and set its "Envelope" property to true
5. Click on the Orders node, and click on the body xPath property, choose Orders and click ok.
6. If you are invoking a send pipeline component within an Orch expression: Open the pipeline properties dialog, and set envelope schema to the Orders schema, and document schema to Order schema
7. Deploy the project

Compacting a Dynamic VHD image

One of the nicest features of using Dynamic VHDs on Virtual Server 2005 is that they grow as needed, so system administrators can optimize the disk space usage between several VMs. Dynamic VHDs grow automatically, but they don’t shrink automatically. In order to shrink them, you need to run several tools both inside and outside of the virtual machine.

In order to compact the VHD image to only use the xxx GB which it is actually using, we need to follow this procedure:

• Defragment the VHD you are going to compact: You can do this from within the Virtual Machine.
• Precompact the disk: Once the defragmentation is completed, you need to run Virtual Server’s Precompactor. you can do this by shutting down your virtual machine and mount the Precompact.iso on the virtual machine.

On VirtualServer admin screen go to configuration of the machine and under CD/DVD change the Capture to "Known image files" and select Precompact.iso. Click OK

• Compress the disk: From the VS Admin screen menu, click Inspect and find your VHD and click Inspect.

Thats it, sit back and relax :-) after a couple of minutes(or hours) based on the VHD size, you would find that the VHD is compresses to use the same amount of space as seen from withing the virtual machine.