A student of mine recently contacted me to ask options for the following functionality.

An incoming message must be duplicated 3 times within a new message. So, as example

<Incoming>
  <ItemID>1</ItemID>
  <Quantity>2</Quantity>
  <CustomerID>3</CustomerID>
</Incoming>

should be transformed into

<NewMessage>
   <Incoming>
      <ItemID>1</ItemID>
      <Quantity>2</Quantity>
      <CustomerID>3</CustomerID>
   </Incoming>
   <Incoming>
      <ItemID>1</ItemID>
      <Quantity>2</Quantity>
      <CustomerID>3</CustomerID>
   </Incoming>
   <Incoming>
      <ItemID>1</ItemID>
      <Quantity>2</Quantity>
      <CustomerID>3</CustomerID>
   </Incoming>
</NewMessage>

My first instinct was to open up the mapper and use a “Looping” functoid. So, I drag & drop the “Looping” functoid, start to fill in.... Doh! That’s when I woke up and realized the “Looping” and “Table Looping” functoids are “source looping” (i.e. for each) while I was looking for a “destination looping” (i.e. for next).

Knowing the 'solves almost anything' external assembly option, I was convinced it is doable in the mapper. What I ended up with is a map with exactly 1 scripting functoid in there. An inline XSLT call-template allowed me to do exactly what I wanted.

As usual, Enjoy and comments are very welcome.