The problem

BizTalk Services' job is to let you connect this to that. What this and that actually are may not always be clear, well defined, or standardized into some internationally recognized protocol. A mapping capability is therefore crucial—a way to convert this into that. On many occasions, mapping requirements may be complex; the need to fundamentally change the shape or structure of a message, for example, or the need to replace data values from the source message with something that makes sense to the receiver. We can break this down into two classes of problems: one that needs to address the structure of a message, transformation; and one that needs to address its content, transcoding or translating it. The two types of mapping, transformation and translation, are both possible with BizTalk Services, as we'll see in this chapter.