Revisiting Splitting Delimited Values in BizTalk Maps

I needed to split a pipe delimited string of unknown length and create one output node for each delimited item. Easy to do, but not so much in a BizTalk map. Thankfully, Richard had a good post on calling an XSL transormation in the map to accomplish this.

The one problem I ran into was, in my case, the pipe delimited string might be empty. Richard's solution ended up generating a single, empty node in my output message. If the input string was empty, I wanted no nodes generated on the output. I modified the XSL to accomplish this. Follow Richard's steps, then use the XSL from below:

<xsl:template name="WritePropertyNodeTemplate">
    <xsl:param name="input" />
        
    <!-- create property node -->
        <!-- create single instance children nodes -->
        <!-- call splitter template which accepts the "|" separated string -->
        <xsl:if test="string-length($input) > 0">
            <xsl:call-template name="StringSplit">
                <xsl:with-param name="val" select="$input" />
            </xsl:call-template>    
        </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

<!-- This template accepts a string and pulls out the value before the designated delimiter -->
<xsl:template name="StringSplit">
    <xsl:param name="val" />

    <!-- do a check to see if the input string (still) has a "|" in it -->
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="contains($val, '|')">
            <!-- pull out the value of the string before the "|" delimiter -->
            <TrackingNumber><xsl:value-of select="substring-before($val, '|')" /></TrackingNumber>
            <!-- recursively call this template and pass in value AFTER the "|" delimiter -->
            <xsl:call-template name="StringSplit">
                <xsl:with-param name="val" select="substring-after($val, '|')" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <!-- if there is no more delimiter values, print out the whole string -->
            <TrackingNumber><xsl:value-of select="$val" /></TrackingNumber>
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>

</xsl:template>