Sending String messages from an Orchestration

Recently one of my colleague asked my help to send a message as "System.String" from an Orchestration. I thought it would be a simple one and did not understand why he needs my help to do this.

When I looked at it, I noticed that the string is wrapped as Xml . It was a little weird to me that in Biztalk 2004 that this cannot be done natively by just declaring as "System.String". Even Biztalk 2000 Xlang had the same kind of Xml Envelope for String, but it would remove that when the message is passed out.

After doing a little research I found that this is documented in the Biztalk 2004 Documentation under "Sending a Text E-Mail Message from an Orchestration". You can see it here

It specifically states that

"Sending a message of type System.String will not work, because the string gets formatted as an XML document in the message"

and tells you use a special class named "RawString" and the code is there in msdn.

As specified in the documentation, I took the code for "RawString" class, placed it in a dll, declared the message as type "RawString" and created an instance and passed in my string. It worked like a charm!

Post a comment if you would like the sample, I'll send you.