Extended Encoding Support

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By default, the HL7 receive pipeline, BTAHL72X, only supports ASCII encoding. This means that any characters in an input message with an equivalent value greater than 127 are replaced with "?". This is because characters with an equivalent value greater than 127 are not represented in the ASCII character set.

BizTalk 2009 Accelerator for HL7 (BTAHL7) provides support for two new encodings:

Western European
UTF-8

You create and build a custom pipeline component to implement extended encoding support. The custom pipeline component uses the BTAHL7 2.X Disassembler. You create a receive location that uses the custom pipeline to process messages. To test the receive location and custom pipeline, you create a send port that uses the BTAHL7 2.XSendPipeline.

To create a custom pipeline

In Visual Studio 2008, add a new Empty BizTalk Server Project.
In Solution Explorer, right-click the new project, click Add, and then click New Item.
In the Add New Item dialog box, add a new Receive Pipeline.

From the pipeline toolbox, drag the BTAHL7 2.X Disassembler to the pipeline editor and drop it onto the Disassemble stage Drop Here target.

Note
If the BTAHL7 2.7 Disassembler is not in the toolbox, right-click in the toolbox, and click Choose Items. In the Choose Toolbox Items dialog box, on the BizTalk Pipeline Component tab, select the BTAHL7 2.X Disassembler check box, and then click OK.

In the Properties pane for the BTAHL7 2.X Disassembler, from the Encoding charset drop-down list, select Western European or UTF8 encoding.

Note
HL7 only supports ASCII (the default), Western European, and UTF8 encoding. Do not select the other encoding options because HL7 does not support them.
On the File menu, click Save All.
Deploy the project.

Create a new receive location to continue.

Note
HL7 only supports ASCII (the default), Western European, and UTF8 encoding. Do not select the other encoding options because HL7 does not support them.

To create a receive location that uses the custom pipeline

On the Start menu, click Programs, point to BizTalk Server 2009, and then click BizTalk Server Administration.
In the BizTalk Server Administration console, expand BizTalk Server 2009 Administration, expand BizTalk Group, expand Applications, expand the application you designated for your pipeline assembly (by default, BizTalk Application 1), right-click Receive Locations, point to New, and then click One-way Receive Location.
In the Receive Location Properties dialog box, in the Receive pipeline drop-down list, select the name of the custom pipeline you created. (This is the name of the custom pipeline object, not the BTAHL7 2X pipeline.)

To create a send port to test the receive location and pipeline

On the Start menu, click Programs, point to BizTalk Server 2009, and then click BizTalk Server Administration.
In the BizTalk Server Administration console, expand BizTalk Server 2009 Administration, expand BizTalk Group, expand Applications, expand the application you designated for your pipeline assembly (by default, BizTalk Application 1), right-click Send Ports, point to New, and then click Static One-way Send Port.
In the Send Port Properties dialog box, in the Send pipeline drop-down list, select BTAHL72XSendPipeline.

To test the receive location and pipeline

Drop a file containing special characters and saved with the same encoding you specified in the custom pipeline into the location designated in the receive location. The file at the output location should preserve the special characters.

Note
If you attempt to process a file that uses a non-supported encoding (remember that only ASCII, Western European, and UTF8 are supported), an error is logged in the Application Event Viewer with error ID: 5633.

Note
If you are testing a custom pipeline configured for UTF8 encoding, you should attach Byte Order Mark (BOM) characters to the message you are passing. If you are testing a custom pipeline configured for Western European encoding, do not attach BOM characters.