What if you need to import a bunch of BizTalk vocabulary rules (.xml files) into the Biztalk BRE (Business Rule Engine)? You don’t want to do it one at time using the Business Rule Deployment Wizard. The real question, is why Microsoft didn’t provide a batch version of that tool that does all the same features, or incorporate those features into the BTTask command.

Microsoft used to provide a tool called ImportExportRuleStore.exe. A reference to this tool can be found on Tallan Blog.

When you search on Microsoft site or MSDN, you can no longer find it nor download it, although there are some .exe copies of it on the old CodePlex site (under the BiztalkBatchBuild project). However, I didn’t want to download an un-trusted .exe. Apparently Microsoft never provided the source for it.

BTDF (BizTalk Deployment Framework) surely has some way to do import rules as well, but I didn’t dig through it. If they do, it’s probably in an MSBuild file.

At least part of that utility now seems to be replaced with a tool called “Microsoft.Practices.ESB.RuleDeployer.exe” in the Microsoft ESB directory (if you have that installed).

You can specify parameters of “-v filename.xml” to import a vocabulary.

See related blog where I have a PowerShell script to batch import all vocabulary files in a directory.