One of the requirements of a recent BizTalk project was to receive Excel files into BizTalk before doing some work on the resulting XML files. I want to share my experiences here.
Using the FarPoint Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 custom BizTalk components to convert the Excel files into XML in a pipeline was the solution we chose. Jan Eliasen wrote two blog articles and describing how to use this third party BizTalk add-in;
- UsingBizTalkToIntegrateToExcelSpreadsheetsPartI
- UsingBizTalkToIntegrateToExcelSpreadsheetsPartII.aspx
This schema to represents my file using the FarPoint schema wizard;
Next I created a receive pipeline using the FarPoint custom Spreadsheet disassemble component and added the above schema to the schema collection.
Both these steps are described in more detail in Jan’s blog.
Document A
Excel document A was successfully disassembled in to the XML below;
<ExcelXLSWorkbook xmlns=”http://FarPointTest.SpreadsheetSchema1″>
<Hello>
<Hello_Record>
<Column0>Sheet1</Column0>
<Column1>Sheet1</Column1>
<Column2>Sheet1</Column2>
</Hello_Record>
<Hello_Record>
<Column0>Hello</Column0>
<Column1>World</Column1>
<Column2>!</Column2>
</Hello_Record>
<Hello_Record>
<Column0>I</Column0>
<Column1>luv</Column1>
<Column2>BizTalk</Column2>
</Hello_Record>
</Hello>
</ExcelXLSWorkbook>
In summary I found the FarPoint Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 a useful tool to convert Excel files into XML.
