How do I set BTS.Operation in a custom pipeline?

Question

Up until now I've only been using orchestrations in my BizTalk application and it's been working fine so far. But now I want to convert some of the unnecessary orchestrations to pure message routing instead in order to get better performance.

I've got a WCF service with only one method and that works fine because I can set the BtsActionMapping to only that single method. But the second WCF service I've got has two methods and now BizTalk doesn't know how to route my message. I've read everywhere that you need to set BTS.Operation in a custom pipeline to get it to work. But I've searched all over the place for a tutorial or example on how to do this.

I've been trying to implement the IBaseComponent, IComponentUI, IComponent and IPersistPropertyBag interfaces to do this. Am I going in the right direction or I'm I way off? Can anyone point me to an example or better yet show me how to do this?

Answer 1

The easiest way to get started writing a custom pipeline component is to use the BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Wizard; it will generate all the boilerplate for you. I've also got several custom pipeline components you can use as an example, a few that are very close to what you need (i.e. a component that just sets a custom message property) can be seen here.

As for setting the property, all you need to do is call message.Context.Write/Promote and pass in the namespace and name of the property, in this case those would be "http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties" and "Operation" respectively.