Chapter 4. Orchestrations

In This Chapter

• Orchestration Designer

• Dehydration and rehydration

• Correlations

• Convoys

• Transactions

• Persistence Points

• Exception Handling

• Debugging

In a BizTalk solution, you can get pretty far with schemas, maps, pipelines, and artifacts like receive ports, send ports, and so on. This is called a messaging-only solution. Sometimes, however, you either need to use a more complex process to be able to do things to incoming messages that you cannot do with a messaging-only solution, or sometimes you actually have a business-defined business process that you want to digitalize. This is what orchestrations can do for you.

A business process can be the process that takes place when a sales order arrives, such as receive order, send order confirmation, send sales order to enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, receive purchase orders from ERP system, send purchase orders to suppliers, receive order confirmations from supplier, and so on. It can also be something like a service aggregator orchestration, meaning that BizTalk can expose a service called CreateNewEmployee, which is called by some internal system, and BizTalk then in turn calls all the needed systems that need updating when a new employee is hired, such as creating the employee in the different internal systems, ordering some flowers for her, ordering a new laptop or desk, and stuff like that.