Choosing between Distinguished vs. Promoted Properties

In Biztalk you can promote a property as either distinguished or promoted properties. Choosing what to use is tricky

Distinguished fields

In general use Distinguished fields if you want to just use them in Orchestration

Summary

- No restriction on field length

- No participation in Routing

- No seperate property Schema

- Not accesible by std pipeline components
( workaround exists in cutom pipeline components “http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/btsDistinguishedFields” namespace using XPath on their name

Promoted Properties

These are generally used with Routing

Summary

- Used in publish and subscribe in the Msgbox

- Field Restictions ( 255)

- Seperate Property schema

- Restricted in the XSD types support compared to distinguished properties

ThumbRule

Use Distinguish properties as they are lightweight unless you need them for any special stuff like Routing ,Tracking ,Correlation or custom pipeline behaviour