Itineraries in the BizTalk ESB Toolkit

In this section, we will get into the details of how itineraries are implemented and used specifically in the ESB Toolkit.

Itinerary structure

As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, itineraries are just the representation of the different itinerary services that will be triggered along with the execution of the itinerary itself.

In the initial versions of the ESB Toolkit (when it still was called ESB Guidance), there was really limited tooling to create the actual itinerary definition files, but the Toolkit has evolved providing a nice visual designer that really helps to abstract from those lower-level details of how the itinerary definition file is made up.

There are two main XML structures related to itineraries, as discussed in the following sections.

The itinerary model

The itinerary model is the XML representation that contains all the information required to describe those itinerary services involved in the itinerary. This is the itinerary representation...