Publish Biztalk WCF Service with multiple schema files and <includes>

Question

What I have here is this:

A Biztalk project in Visual Studio 2010, a corresponding Biztalk application running on a Biztalk 2010 server. The receive port accepts an HL7-V3 schema, transforms it to a schema that is sent off to a SQL server 2008 instance and inserted into tables via a stored procedure. When the receive port is using the FILE adapter, all works as intended (data from the HL7 file is inserted into tables).

So, we reached the point where a web service was needed in order to expose the Receive port via the web...great we have the "Biztalk WCF Service Publishing Wizard" built right into VS2010. This is where I'm stopped in my tracks.

I can follow the wizard as far as the "Create" step, it makes it about half-way to the Extracting Schemas from Biztalk Assembly then it barfs and throws a generic error:

"The given key was not present in the dictionary"

After much searching and head scratching, I was finally led to fact that the wizard uses Xsd.exe (new to me) to generate code from the schemas. This led me to the MSDN library article Here which states that included schemas are ignored by Xsd.exe. Well, the HL7V3 schema-set for the message we are using has about 30 files altogether - all referencing each other all over the place like so:

<xs:include schemaLocation="../coreschemas/infrastructureRoot.xsd"/>
<xs:include schemaLocation="COCT_MT050002UV07.xsd"/>
<xs:include schemaLocation="COCT_MT090100UV01.xsd"/>
<xs:include schemaLocation="COCT_MT240000UV01.xsd"/>
<xs:include schemaLocation="COCT_MT150000UV02.xsd"/>

So there's my problem.

So now my question is this: Is there a way to manually create a WCF service from a Biztalk project, or better yet, just get the Wizard to work for this case? Or, just any suggestions on where to look, as this is my first Biztalk project.

My Googling has only come up with a plethora of how-to's for the Wizard.

Bensonius Bensonius · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-21T18:24:20

Well, the problem has been solved, despite running down way too many rabbit holes, I stumbled upon an MSDN called Getting Started with HL7 v3 and Biztalk Server 2006 article with a little section called Schema Modifications. One of the modifications is to add Target Namespace to some of the coreschema files in HL7 v3.

I had seen this doc in the past and it mentions that this fixes the issue of them being not supported when compiling schemas in BizTalk Server. I kind of ignored it because I was getting no errors and besides, I was using 2010, not 2006 so I naively thought "that must be fixed now...no errors"

Not so, I did exactly as the document suggested and immediately deployed and ran the Biztalk WCF Service Publishing Wizard and it all worked and I was able to view the help and .wsdl pages that were generated.

I hope this helps someone in the future. Very anti-climactic for me.

Publish Biztalk WCF Service with multiple schema files and <includes>

1 Answers