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Idea / RFE Review. Unfortunately on this occasion we do not intend to take this suggestion further forward. This area is not a current business priority for us, and whilst the idea has been active since 2015 it has only gathered a single supporting vote.
RFE Review. Apologies for the length of time this RFE has been in the status of Information Provided. Thank you for clarifying the use case. Perhaps one way forward in future would be for the pattern itself (or through actions applied after the instance is generated) to allow a user to provide further information about the extensions they would like to use. Potentially the pattern could also suggest potential extension options too. Status of the RFE is updated to Uncommitted Candidate.
The mapping of the data elements occurs in BizTalk and strict validation is enforced. Even if all the transformations occurred on the IIB platform - almost all do in this case - in order to map the element to the message box in BizTalk the element must be explicitly defined in the schema referenced by BizTalk. While the message coming out of IIB validates against the uncustomized POSLog schema, how would we know which elements to expect in the extensions in terms of names, data types, restrictions/valid values, and whether or not the element is optional or repeating?
Thank you for raising this Enhancement Request. The original intention of the development accelerator pattern in the Retail pack was to try and encourage the use of uncustomized POSLog schema as an industry standard canonical form, as it was felt this would have wider acceptance in the industry for downstream applications than to rely on data with IBM defined extensions. We also wanted to add value for implementations based on the 4690 point of sale input format, which may have been implemented with user-defined extensions, hence why the pattern accepts this input form of data but does not validate the extension elements on output. Typically we would like to encourage users to deal with data transformation within the context of the IIB message flow. So with this in mind, could you provide us some insight into the mapping actions which you would like to execute within Microsoft BizTalk so we can understand if there is scope for these to be brought into the use case within the IIB message flow ? This would help us understand if the requirement could be satisfied without needing to propagate the IBM user defined extensions beyond the IIB product boundary.