Leaving a element field blank in Map

2 fields on the destination schema are to be left blank and they will be assigned a value in the orchestration at a later stage.

Initially, I didn’t connect/set anything to the fields which should be left blank and deployed the solution and I get the following “inner exception” error.

“Inner exception: A failure occurred while evaluating the distinguished field Header.FILE_COUNTER against the message part data. The message part data does not contain at least one of the nodes specified by the XPath expression (listed below) that corresponds to the distinguished field. The cause for this error may be that the message part data has not been initialized or that the message part data does not conform to the message part schema. Ensure that the message part data is initialized correctly.”

The reason this issue occured is that if you did not connect a value to a field in the destination schema or explicitly set the fields to <empty>, the field will not get initialized and if you try to use that field later, biztalk will throw an inner exception.

To resolve this issue, simply set the ‘Value’ of the element field to <empty>, so that the field will be initialized and it’s value will be set to blank.

Setting the value of a element field to in a map