Question

I get some data from a WebService, which looks like this

Building
     Address
     -> Office
         Name
         CreationDate
         -> Worker
              Name
              HiringDate 

Before doing further processing and transforms on this message, I need to sort the sub-nodes (“Office” and “Worker”) so that all Offices are sorted by CreationDate, and then all Workers are sorted by HiringDate inside their Office.

So far the only solutions I’ve seen for sorting in BizTalk have been XSLT based. There are some samples that show how to sort on a simpler structure (http://www.biztalkgurus.com/newsletter/TheBizTalker-Volume-03.html) but those won’t work as-is since my message has several levels.

If have no idea how to (if that is even possible) write an XSLT expression that will do this sorting while preserving the structure of the XML.

Is it possible to write such an XSLT expression? What would it look like?

Answer 1

Found the solution here:
http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/wellink/archive/2005/12/09/10499.aspx

If we apply that technique to our example we get this XSLT

    <xsl:for-each select="Office">
        <xsl:sort select="CreationDate" data-type="text" order="ascending"/>        
        <Office>
            <xsl:copy-of select="Name"/>
            <xsl:copy-of select="CreationDate"/>
            <xsl:for-each select="Worker">
                <xsl:sort select="HiringDate" data-type="text" order="ascending"/>
                <Worker>
                    <xsl:copy-of select="Name"/>
                    <xsl:copy-of select="HiringDate"/>
                </Worker>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </Office>
    </xsl:for-each>

Then hook it up in the Map as shown below and it works fine.