Calling helper methods from the Business Rules Engine

Here’s a trick that usually gets people new to BizTalk.

The Business Rule Engine has the ability to call (public) static methods on any .Net class, without needing to assert an instance of the class first. However, when you execute your policy, nothing is returned into the policy, and your rules will not work as expected.

The problem is that, by default, the BRE will not execute the static method, unless a specific registry setting is set.  This keeps the default behaviour backwards compatible with the original BTS2004 release of the BRE.

To enable calling these methods, add a REG_DWORD key named “StaticSupport“, with a value of “1” to the following registry path:

32-bit Windows

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0\

64-bit Windows

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0\