Binary Message in Orchestration - Binding vs Direct

Question

Hi,
I've seen a number of questions/answers on here and blogs/posts all over the web suggesting that I can handle binary messages (such as ZIP files or PDFs) through BizTalk Orchestration by declaring the orchestration receive port as message type System.Xml.XmlDocument.
I have built myself a simple orchestration, that receives a message of type System.Xml.Document, logs the receipt of the message and then forwards to a send point (the logging part is key for us, otherwise I would just do a messaging only solution).
I have defined a receive port with a passthru pipeline, and BizTalk picks the message up fine.
My problem comes with binding the orchestration port. If I bind the orchestration port to the receive port, everything works fine; however, I was actually hoping to achieve direct binding with the messagebox (I may have multiple subscribers for these binary
messages). When I change the orchestration to direct binding, with or without a filter expression, the incoming message always suspends saying there are no subscribers available.
My question is, is it possible to achieve this kind of routing using with binary messages, or am I'm going to have to use a receive pipeline to wrap the message in an envelope, or convert to multi-part, or similar?? Articles I've read suggest that a direct
binding using System.Xml.XmlDocument is possible, but try as I might, it won't work!?
I'm using BizTalk 2006 (unfortunately) ... anyone got any ideas?
Regards
Chris

Answer 1

Hi Chris,
Problem is here “I have defined a receive port with a passthru pipeline, and BizTalk picks the message
up fine.” - 
User XML-Receive not passthru.
When you bound your Receive port (Receive location with pass-thru) to orchestration (which has
System.Xml.XmlDocument message type at the Receive shape) , though the Receive-shape’s message type is of type System.Xml.XmlDocument, you have NOT converted
your PDF file content to XML since you had pass-thru pipeline in Receive location. Because
message travelled through an orchestration isn't automatically loaded up into the DOM but rather remains a stream. So in your case, the Orchestration Receive
shape with System.Xml.XmlDocument message type is just acted as message receiver. And since in your orchestration you just did logging, you have not loaded
the content of the PDF from its stream to XMLDoM. So it worked.
But when you used direct, your Orchestration’s subscription is for the System.Xml.XmlDocument but the received PDF was in steam so it won’t work in direct bound
unless you create XML-Receive or custom-pipeline to load the PDF content to some XML base type schema.
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