Character Encoding in the XML Assembler Pipeline Component

The XML Assembler pipeline component can produce messages in user-specified character encoding in two ways, as shown in the following table.

Encoding level	Encoding method
Component	Set the Target charset component property in Pipeline Designer.
Message	Set the XMLNorm.TargetCharset property on the message context. Note: A message context property always overrides any context property set in Pipeline Designer.

The XML Assembler uses the following algorithm to determine output message encoding:

If the XMLNorm.TargetCharset context property is set, its value is used.
Otherwise, if the Target charset property is specified in Pipeline Designer, its value is used.
Otherwise, if the XMLNorm.SourceCharset property is specified, its value is used.
If none of the preceding properties is set, UTF-8 encoding is used.

The XML Assembler saves the encoding information of a BizTalk message object in the IBaseMessagePart.Charset property. When using Unicode or UTF-8 encoding, the XML Assembler always adds the byte order mark (BOM) to outgoing messages.

Note that when using the default XML send pipeline, which contains the XML Assembler component, the produced documents may be encoded by using the same charset as when they were submitted into the server, or they may be encoded by using UTF-8 if documents were created within the server and XMLNorm.TargetCharset was not specified.

See Also