Pro Mapping in BizTalk Server 2009 (Expert's Voice in BizTalk)

Learn good map design techniques for BizTalk Server and you will make huge differences to the processing speed of your implementation, as well as to the scalability and maintainability of your code. Regardless of your experience, expert authors Jim Dawson and John Wainwright ensure you make the right choices to reap the rewards and avoid the potential penalties of poor design.

Pro Mapping in BizTalk Server 2009 provides in?depth coverage of all aspects of mapping to enable you to quickly and efficiently incorporate logic that will fulfill your mapping requirements. While the mapping techniques will be useful for all versions of BizTalk Server, the code is tailored toward BizTalk Server 2006 R3 and demonstrates the latest approaches to standard maps, EDI data, and RFID components. You?ll refer again and again to the multiple solutions that will help solve your new mapping challenges, and soon find this is an essential reference for any BizTalk implementation.

What you?ll learn Solve complex problems within the mapping engine rather than by resorting to custom programming. Become familiar with facets of the EDI standard, such as ASCII X12 and EDIFACT, the types of mapping problems these standards cause, and solutions to those problems. Discover a migration path for developers familiar with the Mercator, Gentran, Application Integrator, and other mapping engines to move to the BizTalk engine. Reduce the cost of mapping by decreasing the time required to complete and test complex maps. Get a clear description of the simpler methods that can be employed to solve seemingly complex problems.
Who is this book for?

This book is suitable for BizTalk developers of any level of experience who are faced with mapping challenges. The material is presented in a clear, concise way to aid understanding by as wide an audience as possible.

About the Apress Pro Series

The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard?won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

User review
Best book on BizTalk mapping ou tthere
This is is a great book to have for mapping reference and to help crack some hard mapping nuts, especially if you are mapping difficult schemas like EDI. Unfortunately it does not cover the new unit testing features in BizTalk 2009 and some of the screenshots are from BizTalk 2006. But don't be fooled - the book has great guidance, best practices, and examples of BizTalk mapping and there is no other book out there with so much info on the topic.

User review
An Essential Resource for BizTalk Developers
If you're going to create data transformations with the BizTalk Mapper, this book will be invaluable. Get it and save yourself a lot of time.

In the first 100 pages the authors explain what you need to know about how the Mapper works and the basic techniques for creating and testing maps. The remaining 300 pages present increasingly complex examples of how to solve real-world problems with the Mapper. This includes over 100 pages dealing with EDI examples. Though obviously relevant for EDI developers, these examples should be studied by anyone using the Mapper, because EDI pushes the Mapper's capabilities to the limit.

I think the most valuable part of the book is Chapter 9, `Collecting Data`, which explains how to create custom data structures inside maps, store them in global variables, and manipulate them in scripting functoids. These techniques aren't described in any other book that I know of, but the authors demonstrate how they hold the key to solving some of the most daunting challenges with the Mapper.

The authors tell you early in the book that you'll need to understand XSLT to use the Mapper effectively, and they use Inline XSLT in many of their examples. But they don't provide a general introduction to XSLT or XPATH, so you'll need to refer to a different work for that, such as Michael Kay's.

The book's organization, writing style and code samples are clear and to the point. The layout and editing live up to the usual Apress standards.