ESB Itinerary Processing

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The Itinerary Processing Service, implemented through the combination of the Itinerary Web service, dispatcher pipeline components and the itinerary processing and caching pipeline components, provides a lightweight dynamic service execution capability. It uses metadata exposed in pre-defined SOAP headers of messages submitted through the Itinerary On-ramp Web service for processing. This metadata can define orchestration services, and process transformation requests and routing steps that BizTalk will execute.

The Itinerary service is responsible for maintaining state, forwarding messages to the correct services, and advancing the itinerary as steps are completed. The Itinerary service effectively decouples processing instructions from the core BizTalk Server engine.

The Itinerary service supports process orchestration, transformation, and routing steps defined in the message SOAP headers and passed to the BizTalk engine through the Itinerary On-ramp Web service. The Itinerary service includes several generic processes that handle routing and transformation and is responsible for dispatching messages to the appropriate services.

The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides the following pipeline components to support itinerary processing:

• Itinerary processing and caching pipeline components. These provide pre-processing and validation for all messages submitted through the Itinerary On-ramp Web services. Additionally, the caching component manages itineraries by providing “smart” caching for solicit-response dynamic send ports.

For information about the Itinerary processing classes, see Using the Helper Classes.