Property editors & pipeline components

There have been a lot of questions in the newsgroups recently regarding custom type editors within pipeline components.

I've created a sample component in which you choose which database you'd like to connect to and subsequently choose a customer the pipeline component is specific to. These kind of properties could be used to perform customer specific actions within a pipeline component.

Currently, the component implements a UITypeEditor derivement to implement it's editing functionality for choosing a customer. It uses the NorthWind database within the choosen server, and has very little error checking to see whether or not the DBMS exists, etc.

However, it demonstrates the purpose of custom editors for your properties, besides the obvious SchemaWithNone and SchemaList which are already supplied within Microsoft.BizTalk.Component.Utilities.dll and within my Pipeline Component Wizard.

Now for a screenshot, as it usually clarifies a lot (I've removed a portion of the connection string configured):



The component can be downloaded here

Please note this:

1) As BizTalk uses a component called ComponentObjectWrapper to wrap the actual object being handled within the pipeline component editor, and you simply cannot reference Microsoft.BizTalk.PipelineEditor.dll in a decent way without breaking Visual Studio integration with BizTalk, I've applied a "dirty" reflection hack in which I at runtime retrieve the actually instantiated component from this object using reflection, like this:

BindingFlags bindingFlags = BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance;
Type t = context.Instance.GetType();
FieldInfo fi = t.GetField("cachedPipelineComponent", bindingFlags);
CustomerSpecificComponent instance = fi.GetValue(context.Instance) as CustomerSpecificComponent;

 

It's a dirty way to get to the object, but it means I don't have to reference any other components and currently seems to be the only way to achieve reading another property from our design-time component.

2) The project has a build event specified which should deploy the component to the GAC. If it doesn't work, please alter it to represent the location of your gacutil installation.

As always, all sourcecode is included, and comments are very welcome!