Splitting Delimited Values in BizTalk Maps

Today, one of our BizTalk developers asked me how to take a delimited string stored in a single node, and extract all those values into separate destination nodes.  I put together a quick XSLT operation that makes this magic happen.

So let’s say I have a source XML structure like this:

I need to get this pipe-delimited value into an unbounded destination node.  Specifically, the above XML should be reshaped into the format here:

Notice that each pipe-delimited value is in its own “value” node.  Now I guess I could chained together 62 functoids to make this happen, but it seemed easier to write a bit of XSLT that took advantage of recursion to split the delimited string and emit the desired nodes.

My map has a scripting functoid that accepts the three values from the source (included the pipe-delimited “values” field) and maps to a parent destination record.

Because I want explicit input variables  to my functoid (vs. traversing the source tree just to get the individual nodes I need), I’m using the “Call Templates” action of the Scripting functoid.

My XSLT script is as follows:

<!-- This template accepts three inputs and creates the destination 
"Property" node.  Inside the template, it calls another template which 
builds up the potentially repeating "Value" child node -->
<xsl:template name="WritePropertyNodeTemplate">
<xsl:param name="name" />
<xsl:param name="type" />
<xsl:param name="value" />

<!-- create property node -->
<Property>
<!-- create single instance children nodes -->
<Name><xsl:value-of select="$name" /></Name>
<Type><xsl:value-of select="$type" /></Type>

<!-- call splitter template which accepts the "|" separated string -->
<xsl:call-template name="StringSplit">
<xsl:with-param name="val" select="$value" />
</xsl:call-template>
</Property>
</xsl:template>

<!-- This template accepts a string and pulls out the value before the 
designated delimiter -->
<xsl:template name="StringSplit">
<xsl:param name="val" />

<!-- do a check to see if the input string (still) has a "|" in it -->
<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="contains($val, '|')">
   <!-- pull out the value of the string before the "|" delimiter -->
   <Value><xsl:value-of select="substring-before($val, '|')" /></Value>
     
     <!-- recursively call this template and pass in 
value AFTER the "|" delimiter -->
     <xsl:call-template name="StringSplit">
     <xsl:with-param name="val" select="substring-after($val, '|')" />
     </xsl:call-template>

  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
      <!-- if there is no more delimiter values, print out 
the whole string -->
      <Value><xsl:value-of select="$val" /></Value>
   </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

</xsl:template>

Note that I use recursion to call the “string splitter” template and I keep passing in the shorter and shorter string into the template.   When I use this mechanism, I end up with the destination XML shown at the top.

Any other way you would have done this?

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