What do you when you cannot connect an element on the left to one on the right in a Biztalk map?  Today, I had a case where I was trying to update a map created by another developer.  I thought the values on the right side were missing, but later I noticed they had a value in the property.  At first, I thought these values were defaulted in the schema, but a closer look at the schema showed no default values.

So this comes to show that you can set the value of an element by just typing in the value in the “Value” property.  Once you have set that property, you can no longer drag and drop any value into that element on the GUI part of the map.

Here’s an example with a small schema with just two elements:

Below is an example what happens when you try to connect an element (after the value is set).  The icon will change to the “no drop” (circle with a slash through it) symbol.

So this goes to show that after 15 years or more of BizTalk, you can still learn new tricks and find new issues.