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Any Element Nodes

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In BizTalk Editor, you can use an Any Element node to indicate a location within an instance message where unknown elements may appear. This accommodates situations in which you know that some element might appear at a particular location within an instance message, but you do not know the name of the element, or how complicated it might be. If you place an Any Element node at the appropriate location within the schema, BizTalk can process such unknown portions of a message. The only requirement is that the corresponding XML is well-formed.

Note

In BizTalk Editor, the Any Element node is represented with the string <Any> in the schema tree view.

Note

You can control the degree to which the unknown portion of the message is validated as well-formed XML by using the Process Contents property. In many cases you may need to set the Process Contents property to Skip for the contents of an instance message at the location of the Any Element node to be processed. Retaining the default value of Strict for the Process Contents property will prevent instance message validation from passing.

More details on this property in the UI guidance and developers API namespace reference.

XSD representation

When an Any Element node is added to a Record node, or to another node to which it can be added such as a Sequence Group, Choice Group, or All Group node, a single XML tag is added to the corresponding XML Schema definition (XSD) language representation of the schema. In the following example, a new Any Element node, whose XSD representation is shown in bold type, has been added to an existing Record node that already contains a Field Element node.

<xs:element name="ExistingRecord">  
    <xs:complexType>  
        <xs:sequence>  
             <xs:element name="ExistingFieldElement" type="xs:string" />  
            <xs:any />  
        </xs:sequence>  
    </xs:complexType>  
</xs:element>

Assuming that the Process Contents property of the Any Element node is set to Skip, within an instance message governed by this schema fragment, an ExistingRecord element is expected to contain an ExistingFieldElement element containing string data, followed by any single element of arbitrary complexity.

See Also

BizTalk Representation of Schemas
Node Properties
How to Set Node Properties
Any Attribute Nodes