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Has anyone played around with BizTalk Mapper?



I'm not Microsoft affiliated, but I did find a really really cool
tool on their site which actually mirrors a tool that I'm currently
building for my client... and that is the BizTalk Mapper.

Go to: www.microsoft.com/biztalk and download the BizTalk Technology
Preview.  Inside the XML tools, is a tool called the BizTalk Mapper.
Essentially, it allows you to graphically create XML-to-XML XSLT
scripts without really having to know XSLT.  It's still a little
bulky and you have to actually use Microsoft's other XML tools to
create specifications for this tool to use to accurately do the 
mappings.  But the functoids graphing thing is such an excellent
visual way of wrapping common function mapping from one XML element
to another.  I still dont think it covers some pretty common XML
structure transformation problems, and it doesn't support the ability
to map the destination element to a plain literal (though I guess
you could use a scripted functiod for it).  

I was actually building a tool similar to this tool for a client,
actually I was just building a prototype.  It seems that in both
of our implementations, you do need some intermediate XML mapping
file that is expressed in XML.  I think Microsoft got too complicated
with theirs... and they get too proprietary with some of their XML
Biztalk standards.  They should have just inserted simple mapping
tags within a fleshed out version of the destination XML file.  I
also dont like the fact that you're tied to the MSXSL processor
and VB scripts.  But oh well... in any case, it is the FIRST truly
graphical XML-to-XML XSLT creator I've seen out there.  IBM has some
things in its alphaworks that come close, but this is the first
that really rounds all the ideas out and actually has a pretty 
cool interface.

Check it out.


-------------------------------------
Michael J. Hudson
Software/Framework Engineer
mhudson@blueprinttech.com

cell-phone: 703.932.6412
voice-mail: 703.827.0638 ext. 4786
fax: 703.734.0987

Blueprint Technologies
"The E-Solution Architect" 
http://www.blueprinttech.com


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