Thursday 21 December 2017

Run SQLcl from ANT

I think since last year ORacle released SQLcl which could be seen as the commandline variant of SQL Developer. But even better: a replacement of SQL Plus.

A few years ago I created what I called a InfraPatch framework, to do preparations on an infrastructure as a pre-requisite for the deployment of services and/or applications. It can run WLST scripts for creating datasouces, jms-queues, etc.  It also supported the running of database scripts, but it required an sqlplus installation, for instance using the instant client. Since it was part of a release/deploy toolset, where the created release is to be deployed by an IT admin on a test, acceptance or production environment, I had to rely on a correct Oracle/instant client installation on an agreed location.

I'm in the process of revamping that framework and renamed to InfraPrep,  since preparing an infrastructural environment makes it more clear what it does. (It does not patch a system with Oracle patches...).

Now I'm at the point that I have to implement the support of running database scripts. The framework uses ANT, which in fact is Java. And SQLcl has two big advantages that makes it ideal for me to use in my InfraPrep framework:
  • It is incredibly small: it's only 19MB! And that includes the ojdbc and xmlparser jars. Since i used ANT from a FusionMiddleWare home, I could make it even smaller! 
  • It is Java, so I can leverage the java ant task.
 So, how to call SQLcl from ANT? I need a few ingredients:
  • Download and unzip SQLcl into my Ant project and add a sqlcl.home property:
    sqlcl.home=${basedir}/sqlcl
  • The actual sqlcl jar file and add the sqlcl.jar property for that:
    sqlcl.jar=oracle.sqldeveloper.sqlcl.jar
  • The main class file = oracle.dbtools.raptor.scriptrunner.cmdline.SqlCli
These ingredients can be found in the sql.bat in the bin folder of the SQLcl download.

Then of course in my environment property file I need the user name, password and database url.
Something like:
DWN.dbUrl=(description=(address=(host=darlin-vce-db.org.darwinit.local)(protocol=tcp)(port=1521))(connect_data=(service_name=orcl)))
DWN.dbUserName=dwn_owner
DWN.dbPassword=dwn_owner

I used a TNS-style database URL, since it is the same as used in the creation of the corresponding DataSource. And it can be reused to connect with SQLcl.

Now, to make it easier to use and to abstract the plumbing in a sort of  ANT task, I crated a macrodef:


 <!-- Create Add Outbound connection pool to DB adapter-->
  <macrodef name="runDbScript">
    <attribute name="dbuser"/>
    <attribute name="dbpassword"/>
    <attribute name="dburl"/>
    <attribute name="dbscript"/>
    <sequential>
      <logMessage message="DatabaseUrl: @{dburl}" level="info"/>
      <logMessage message="DatabaseUser: @{dbuser}" level="info"/>
      <logMessage message="DatabasePassword: ****" level="info"/>
      <property name="dbConnectStr" value='@{dbuser}/@{dbpassword}@"@{dburl}"'/>
      <property name="dbScript.absPath" location="@{dbscript}"/>
      <property name="dbScriptArg" value="@${dbScript.absPath}"/>
      <logMessage message="Run Database script: ${dbScriptArg}" level="info"/>
      <record name="${log.file}" action="start" append="true"/>
      <java classname="oracle.dbtools.raptor.scriptrunner.cmdline.SqlCli" failonerror="true" fork="true">
        <arg value="${dbConnectStr}"/>
        <arg value="${dbScriptArg}"/>
        <classpath>
          <pathelement location="${sqlcl.home}/lib/${sqlcl.jar}"/>
        </classpath>
      </java>
      <record name="${log.file}" action="stop"/>
    </sequential>
  </macrodef>
</project>

In this macrodefinition, I first build up a database connect string using the username, password and database url:
      <property name="dbConnectStr" value='@{dbuser}/@{dbpassword}@"@{dburl}"'/>
Then I use a little trick to create an absolute path of the dbscript path:
      <property name="dbScript.absPath" location="@{dbscript}"/>
The trick is in the location attribute of the property.
And since that now is a property instead of an attribute, I circumvented the need for escaping the @ character:
      <property name="dbScriptArg" value="@${dbScript.absPath}"/>
The logmessage task you see is another macrodef I use:
      <macrodef name="logMessage">
            <attribute name="message" default=""/>
            <attribute name="level" default="debug"/>
            <sequential>
                  <echo message="@{message}" level="@{level}"></echo>
                  <echo file="${log.file}" append="true"
                        message="@{message}${line.separator}" level="@{level}"></echo>
            </sequential>
      </macrodef>

It both echo's the output to the console and to a log file.
Since I want the output of the java task into the same log file, I enclosed the java task with record tasks to start and stop the appending of the output-stream to the log file.

The java task is pretty simple, referencing the jar file in the classpath and providing the connect string and the script run argument as two separate arguments.
There are however two important properties:
  • failonerror="true": I want to quit my ANT scripting when the database script fails.
  • fork="true": when providing the exit statement in the sql script, SQLcl tries to quit the JVM. This is not allowed, because it runs by default in the same JVMas ANT. Not providing the exit statement in the script will keep the thread in SQLcl, which is not acceptable. So, forking the JVM will allow SQLcl to quit properly.
Now, the macro can be called as follows:
    <propertycopy name="dbUser" from="${database}.dbUserName"/>
    <propertycopy name="dbUrl" from="${database}.dbUrl"/>
    <propertycopy name="dbPassword" from="${database}.dbPassword"/>
    <runDbScript dbuser="${dbUser}" dbpassword="${dbPassword}" dburl="${dbUrl}" dbscript="${prep.folder}/${dbScript}"/>

Where these properties are used:
database=DWN
dbScript=sample.sql

Ant the sample.sql file:
select * from global_name;
exit;

And this works like a charm:
runPrep:
     [echo] Script voor uitvoeren van database script.
     [echo] Environment:
     [echo] Prep folder: ../../infraPreps/BpmDbS0004
     [echo] Load prep property file ../../infraPreps/BpmDbS0004/BpmDbS0004.properties
     [echo] Run Script
     [echo] DatabaseUrl: (description=(address=(host=darlin-vce-db.org.darwinit.local)(protocol=tcp)(port=1521))(connect_data=(service_name=orcl)))
     [echo] DatabaseUser: dwn_owner
     [echo] DatabasePassword: ****
     [echo] Run Database script: @c:\temp\FMWReleaseAll\DWN\1.0.0\infraPreps\BpmDbS0004\sample.sql
     [java]
     [java] SQLcl: Release 17.3.0 Production on do dec 21 11:18:50 2017
     [java]
     [java] Copyright (c) 1982, 2017, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
     [java]
     [java] Connected to:
     [java] Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
     [java] With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP,
     [java] Data Mining and Real Application Testing options
     [java]
     [java]
     [java] GLOBAL_NAME
     [java] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     [java] ORCL
     [java]
     [java]
     [java] Disconnected from Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
     [java] With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP,
     [java] Data Mining and Real Application Testing options
     [echo] Done running preperations.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 12 seconds

One thing to be arranged though is the fetch of the username/password from the commandline, instead of properties. This can be as follows:
    <input message="Enter database user for environment ${database}: " addproperty="db.user"/>
    <input message="Enter password for user ${db.user}: " addproperty="db.password">
      <handler classname="org.apache.tools.ant.input.SecureInputHandler"/>
    </input>

Conclusion

SQLcl is great, since it is small and in java. So it turns out incredibly easy to distribute it within your own framework.

Wednesday 20 December 2017

OSB 12c Customization in WLST, some new insights: use the right jar for the job!

Problem setting  and investigation

Years ago I created a Release & Deploy framework for Fusion Middleware, also supporting Oracle Service Bus. Recently revamped it to use 12c. It uses WLST to import the OSB service to the Service Bus, including the execution the customization file.

There are lots of examples to do this, but I want to zoom in on the execution of the customization file.

The WLST function that does this, that I use is as follows:
#=======================================================================================
# Function to execute the customization file.
#=======================================================================================
def executeCustomization(ALSBConfigurationMBean, createdRefList, customizationFile):
    if customizationFile!=None:
      print 'Loading customization File', customizationFile
      inputStream = FileInputStream(customizationFile)
      if inputStream != None:
        customizationList = Customization.fromXML(inputStream)
        if customizationList != None:
          filteredCustomizationList = ArrayList()
          setRef = HashSet(createdRefList)
          print 'Filter to remove None customizations' 
          print "-----"
          # Apply a filter to all the customizations to narrow the target to the created resources
          print 'Number of customizations in list: ', customizationList.size()
          for customization in customizationList:
            print "Add customization to list: "
            if customization != None:
              print 'Customization: ', customization, " - ", customization.getDescription()
              newCustomization = customization.clone(setRef)
              filteredCustomizationList.add(newCustomization)
            else:
              print "Customization is None!"
            print "-----"
          print 'Number of resulting customizations in list: ', filteredCustomizationList.size()
          ALSBConfigurationMBean.customize(filteredCustomizationList)
        else:
          print 'CustomizationList is null!'
      else:
        print 'Input Stream for customization file is null!'
    else:
      print 'No customization File provided, skip customization.'

The parameter ALSBConfigurationMBean can be fetched with:
...
        sessionName = createSessionName()
        print 'Created session', sessionName
        SessionMBean = getSessionManagementMBean(sessionName)
        print 'SessionMBean started session'
        ALSBConfigurationMBean = findService(String("ALSBConfiguration.").concat(sessionName), "com.bea.wli.sb.management.configuration.ALSBConfigurationMBean")
...

The other parameter is the createdRefList, that is build up from the default ImportPlan during import of the config jar:
...
          print 'ÒSB project', project, 'will get updated'
            osbJarInfo = ALSBConfigurationMBean.getImportJarInfo()
            osbImportPlan = osbJarInfo.getDefaultImportPlan()
            osbImportPlan.setPassphrase(passphrase)
            operationMap=HashMap()
            operationMap = osbImportPlan.getOperations()
            print
            print 'Default importPlan'
            printOpMap(operationMap)
            set = operationMap.entrySet()

            osbImportPlan.setPreserveExistingEnvValues(true)

            #boolean
            abort = false
            #list of created artifact refences
            createdRefList = ArrayList()
            for entry in set:
                ref = entry.getKey()
                op = entry.getValue()
                #set different logic based on the resource type
                type = ref.getTypeId
                if type == Refs.SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TYPE or type == Refs.SERVICE_PROVIDER_TYPE:
                    if op.getOperation() == ALSBImportOperation.Operation.Create:
                        print 'Unable to import a service account or a service provider on a target system', ref
                        abort = true
                else:
                    #keep the list of created resources
                    print 'ref: ',ref
                    createdRefList.add(ref)
            if abort == true :
                print 'This jar must be imported manually to resolve the service account and service provider dependencies'
                SessionMBean.discardSession(sessionName)
                raise
            print
            print 'Modified importPlan'
            printOpMap(operationMap)
            importResult = ALSBConfigurationMBean.importUploaded(osbImportPlan)
            printDiagMap(importResult.getImportDiagnostics())              
            if importResult.getFailed().isEmpty() == false:
                print 'One or more resources could not be imported properly'
                raise
...

The meaning is to build up a set of references of created artefact, to narrow down the customizations to only execute them on the artefacts that are actually imported.

Now, back to the executeCustomization function. It first creates an InputStream on the customization file:
inputStream = FileInputStream(customizationFile)

on which it builds a list of customizations using the .fromXML method of the Customization object:
        customizationList = Customization.fromXML(inputStream)

These customizations are interpreted from the Customization file. If you open that you can find several customization elements:
 <cus:customization xsi:type="cus:EnvValueActionsCustomizationType">
        <cus:description/>
...
    <cus:customization xsi:type="cus:FindAndReplaceCustomizationType">
        <cus:description/>
...
    <cus:customization xsi:type="cus:ReferenceCustomizationType">
        <cus:description/>


These all are mapped to subclasses of the Customization. And now the reason that I write this blogpost is that I ran into a problem with my import tooling. In the EnvValueActionsCustomizationType the endpoint replacements for the target environments is done. And the weren't executed. In fact these customizations were in the customizationList, but as a None/Null object. Thus, executing this complete list using ALSBConfigurationMBean.customize(filteredCustomizationList) would run in an exception, refering to a null object in the customization list. That's why they're filtered out. But why weren't these interpreted by the .fromXml() method?

Strangely enough in the javaAPI docs of 12.2.1 the EnvValueActionsCustomization does not exist, but the EnvValueCustomization does. But searching My Oracle Support shows in Note 1679528.2: 'A new customization type EnvValueActionsCustomizationType is available in 12c which is used when creating a configuration plan file.' and here in the Java API doc (click on com.bea.wli.config.customization) it is stated that EnvValueCustomization is deprecated and EnvValueActionsCustomization should be used in stead.
Apparently the docs is not updated completely....
And it seems that I used a wrong jar file: The customization file was created using the Console, and executing the customization file using the console did execute the endpoint replacements. So I figured that I must be using a wrong version of the jar file.
So I searched on my BPM quickstart installation (12.2.1.2) for the class EnvValueCustomization:
Jar files containing EnvValueCustomization
  • C:\Oracle\JDeveloper\12210_BPMQS\osb\lib\modules\oracle.servicebus.configfwk.jar/com\bea\wli\config\customization\EnvValueCustomization.class
  • C:\Oracle\JDeveloper\12210_BPMQS\oep\spark\lib\spark-osa.jar/com\bea\wli\config\customization\EnvValueCustomization.class
  • C:\Oracle\JDeveloper\12210_BPMQS\oep\common\modules\com.bea.common.configfwk_1.3.0.0.jar/com\bea\wli\config\customization\EnvValueCustomization.class
And then I did a search with EnvValueActionsCustomization.
Jar files containing EnvValueActionsCustomization:
  • C:\Oracle\JDeveloper\12210_BPMQS\osb\lib\modules\oracle.servicebus.configfwk.jar/com\bea\wli\config\customization\EnvValueActionsCustomization.class

Solution

It turns out that in my ANT script I used:
<path id="library.osb">
  <fileset dir="${fmw.home}/oep/common/modules">
     <include name="com.bea.common.configfwk_1.3.0.0.jar"/>
  </fileset> 
  <fileset dir="${weblogic.home}/server/lib">
    <include name="weblogic.jar"/>
    <include name="wls-api.jar"/>
  </fileset>
  <fileset dir="${osb.home}/lib">
    <include name="alsb.jar"/>
  </fileset>
</path>

Where I should use:
<path id="library.osb">
  <fileset dir="${fmw.home}/osb/lib/modules">
    <include name="oracle.servicebus.configfwk.jar"/>
  </fileset>
  <fileset dir="${weblogic.home}/server/lib">
    <include name="weblogic.jar"/>
    <include name="wls-api.jar"/>
  </fileset>
  <fileset dir="${osb.home}/lib">
    <include name="alsb.jar"/>
  </fileset>
</path>

Conclusion

It took me quite some time to debug this. But learned how the customization works. I found quite some examples that use com.bea.common.configfwk_1.X.0.0.jar. And apparently during my revamping, I updated this class path (actually I had 1.7, and found only 1.3 in my environment).  But, somehow Oracle found it sensible to replace it with oracle.servicebus.configfwk.jar while keeping the old jar files.
So use the right Jar for the job!

Monday 18 December 2017

Create the SOA/BPM Demo User Community, with just WLST.

As said in my previous post (I've learned somewhere you should not post twice on the same day, but spread it out over time), I'm delivering a BPM 12c training. And based it on the BPM Quickstart. Although nice for UnitTests and development, the integrated weblogic lacks a  proficient set of users to test your task definitions.

Oracle has a demo community and a set of ANT and Servlet based scripts to povision your SOA or BPMSuite environment with a set of American literature writers, to be used in demo's and trainings. I some how found this years ago and had it debugged to be used in 12.1.3 a few years ago. However, I did not know where I got it and if it was free to be delivered.

Apparently it is, and you can find it at my oracle support. Our friends with Avio Consulting also  did a good job in making it available and working with 12c. However, I could not make it work smoothly end 2 end. I got it seeded, but figured that I would not need ANT and a Servlet.

Last year, in 2016, I created a bit of WLST scripting to create users for OSB and have them assigned to OSB Application roles. You can read about that here for the user creation, and here for the app-role assignment.

One thing that's missing in those scripts is the setting of the user attributes. So I googled around and found a means to add those too.

First, I had to transform the demo community seeding xml file to a property file. Like this:

#
cdickens.password=welcome1
cdickens.description=Demo User
cdickens.email=cdickens@emailExample.com
cdickens.title=CEO
cdickens.firstName=Charles
cdickens.lastName=Dickens
cdickens.timeZone=America/Los_Angeles
cdickens.languagePreference=en-US
cdickens.workPhone=100000001
cdickens.homePhone=200000001
cdickens.mobile=300000001
cdickens.im=jabber|cdickens@exampleIM.com

The complete, usersAndGroups.properties file is available here.
In an earlier blog, I wrote about how to read a property file. But my prefered method, does not allow me to determine the property to be fetched dynamically. That's why I split my basic createDemoUsers.properties file, that refers to the usersAndGroups.properties file, and contains the properties refering the Oracle/Jdeveloper home and the connection details for the AdminServer. This property file also contains comma separated lists of users, groups and AppRoles to be created or  granted.

The actual createDemoUsers.py file loops over the three lists and creates the particular users and groups, and grants the AppRoles.

To set the attributes, the setUserAttributeValue of the authenticatorMBean can be used as follows:
    #Set Properties
    firstName=userProps.getProperty(userName+".firstName")
    lastName=userProps.getProperty(userName+".lastName")
    displayName=nvl(firstName, " ")+" "+nvl(lastName, " ")
    authenticator.setUserAttributeValue(userName,"displayName",displayName.strip())

I published the complete set of scripts on the GitHub repo I shared with my colleague.
You can download them all, adapt the createDemoUsers.sh, to refer the correct MW_HOME to your JDeveloper environment. For Windows you might translate it to a .bat/.cmd file.

And of course you can use it for your own set of users.

I think I covered near to all of the Demo User community. Except for management-chains: I could not find how to register a manager for a user in Weblogic. Neither in the console, nor inWLST. So, I currently I conclude it cannot be done. But, if you have a tip, please be so good to leave a comment. I would highly appreciate it.

2018-08-22, Update: found this article referencing the BPM roles, from my appreciated former Whitehorses co-worker. Should be able to integrate this in my scripts.




BPM 12.2.1.3: Exception when deploying BPM project with Human tasks

This week I deliver a BPM 12c Workshop, that I based on the 12.2.1.3 BPM QuickStart. When the students worked on the lab on Human Workflow, they hit an error deploying the Composite, where in the log you can find something like:

Caused By: oracle.fabric.common.FabricException: Error occurred during deployment of component: RequestHolidayTask to service engine: implementation.workflow, for composite: HolidayRequestProcess: ORABPEL-30257
 
exception.code:30257
exception.type: ERROR
exception.severity: 2
exception.name: Error while Querying workflow task metadata.
exception.description: Error while Querying workflow task metadata.
exception.fix: Check the underlying exception and the database connection information.  If the error persists, contact Oracle Support Services.
: exception.code:30257
exception.type: ERROR
exception.severity: 2
exception.name: Error while Querying workflow task metadata.
exception.description: Error while Querying workflow task metadata.
exception.fix: Check the underlying exception and the database connection information.  If the error persists, contact Oracle Support Services.
 
Caused By: oracle.fabric.common.FabricDeploymentException: ORABPEL-30257
 
 
Caused By: java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: Column 'WFTM.PACKAGENAME' is either not in any table in the FROM list or appears within a join specification and is outside the scope of the join specification or appears in a HAVING clause and is not in the GROUP BY list. If this is a CREATE or ALTER TABLE  statement then 'WFTM.PACKAGENAME' is not a column in the target table.

Apparently in the repository of 12.2.1.3 a column is missing in the Workflow Metadata table.

Luckily, I stumbled upon a question in the community.oracle.com forum that hit this 'bug' as well; and provided a solution. You need to do an alter table to resolve this:
ALTER TABLE SOAINFRA.WFTASKMETADATA ADD PACKAGENAME varchar (200);

The smart guy that provided the answer, used a separate Database UI tool. But fortunately, JDeveloper is perfectly capable to provide you de means as well.

First open the Resource Pallette in JDeveloper. Make sure that you have started your Integrated WebLogic already (since that will run the DerbyDB.

Then in the Resource Pallette, create a new Database Connection:


Provide the following details:
Give it a name, like soainfraDB, as a Connection Type select 'Java DB / Apache Derby'. You can leave Username and Password empty. Then as a Driver Class, choose the 'org.apache.derby.jdbc.ClientDriver' (not the default). Then as a Host Name provide localhost, as a JDBC Port enter 1527 en as  a Database Name enter soainfra.

You can  Test Connection  and then, if Successfull, hit OK.

Then from the IDE Connections pallette  right click your newly created database connection, and choose 'Open in Databases Window':



And from that right click on the database connection and choose 'Open SQL Worksheet':

There you can enter and execute the alter statement:
After this, deployment should succeed. Since it is persisted in the DerbyDB it will survive restarts.

This might apply to the SOA QuickStart as well (did not try).

Friday 1 December 2017

OSB: Disable Chunked Streaming Mode recommendation

Intro

These weeks I got involved in a document generation performance issue. This ran for several months, maybe years even. But it stayed quite unclear what the actual issue was.

Often we got complaints that document generation from the front-end application (based on Siebel) was taking very long. End users often hit the button several times, but with no luck. Asking further, it did not mean that there appeared a document in the content management system (Oracle UCM/WCC). So, we concluded that it wasn't so much a performance issue, but an exception along the process of document generation. Since we upgraded BI Publisher to 12c, it was figured that it might got something to do with that. But we did not find any problems with BI Publisher, itself. Also, there was an issue with Siebel it's self, but that's also out of the scope of this article.

The investigation

First, on OSB the retry interval of the particular Business Service was decreased from 60 seconds to 10. And the performance increased. Since the retry interval was shorter, OSB does a retry on shorter notice. But of course this did not solve the problem.

As Service developers we often are quite laconical about retries. We make up some settings. Quite default is an interval of 30 seconds and a retry count of 3. But, we should actually think about this and figure out what the possible failures could be and what a sensible retry setting would be. For instance: is it likely that the remote system is out of order? What are the SLA's for hoisting it back up again? If the system startup is 10 minutes, then a retry count of 3 and interval of 30 seconds is not making sense. The retries are done long before the system's up again. But of course, in our case sensible settings for system outage would cause delays being too long. We apparently needed to cater for network issues.

Last week our sysadmins encountered network failures, so they changed the LoadBalancer of BIP Publisher, to get chunks/packets of one requests routed to the same BI Publisher node. I found SocketReadTimeOuts in the logfiles. And from the Siebel database a query was done and plotted out in Excel showing lots of request in the  1-15 seconds range, but also some plots in ranges around 40 seconds and 80 seconds. We wondered why these were.

The Connection and Read TimeOut settings on the Business Service were set to 30s. So I figured the 40 and 80 seconds range could have something to do with a retry interval of 10s added to a time out of 30 seconds.

I soon found out that in OSB on the Business Service, the Chunked Streaming Mode  was enabled. This is a setting we struggled with a lot. Several issues we encountered were blamed on this one. As a Helpdesk employee would ask you if you have restarted your system, on OSB questions I would ask you about this setting first... Actually, I did for this case, long before I got actively involved.

Chunked Streaming Mode explained

Let's start with a diagram:

In this diagram you'll see that the OSB is fronted by a Load Balancer. But since 12c the Oracle HTTP Server is added to the Weblogic Infrastructure. And following the Enterprise Deployment Guide we added an OHS to the Weblogic Infrastructure Domain, as a co-located OHS Instance. And since the OSB as well as the Service Provider (in our case BI Publisher) are clustered, the OHS will load balance the requests.

Now, the Chunked transfer encoding is an HTTP 1.1 specification. It is an improvement that allows clients to process the data in chunks right after the chunk is read. But in most (of our) cases a chunk on itself is meaning-less, since a SOAP Request/XML Document need to be parsed as a whole.
The Load Balancer also process the chunks as separate entities. So,by default, it will route the first one to the first endpoint, and the other one to the next. And thus each SP Managed Server gets an incomplete message and there for a so-called Bad Request. This happens with big requests, where for instance a report is requested together with the complete content. Then chances are that the request is split up in chunks.

But although the SysAdmins adapted the SP Load Balancer, and although I was involved in the BIPublisher 12c setup, even I forgot about the BIP12c OHS! And even when the LoadBalancer tries to keep the chunks together, then again the OHS will mess with them. Actually, if the LoadBalancer did not keep them together, the OHS instances could reroute them again to the correct end-node.

The Solution

So for all those Service Bus developers amongst you, I'd like you to memorize two concepts: "Chunked Streaming Mode" and "disable", and the latter in combination with the first, of course.
In short: remember to set Chunked Streaming Mode to disable in every SOAP/http based Business Service. Especially with services that send potentially large requests, for instance document check-in services on Content/Document Management Systems.

The proof of the pudding

After some discussion and not being able to test it on the Acceptance Test environment, due to rebuilds, we decided to change this in production (I would/should not recommend that, at least not right away).

And this was the result:


This picture shows that the first half of the day, plenty requests were retried at least once, and several even twice. Notice the request durations around the 40 seconds (30 seconds read timeout + 10 seconds retry interval) and 80 seconds. But since 12:45, when we disabled the Chunked Streaming Mode we don't see any timeout exceptions any more. I hope the end users are happy now.

Or how a simple setting can throw a spanner in the works. And how difficult it is to get such a simple change into production. Personally I think it's a pity that the Chunked Streaming Mode is enabled by default, since in most cases it causes problems, while in rare cases it might provide some performance improvements. I think you should rationalize the enablement of it, in stead of actively needing to disable it.

Friday 24 November 2017

BPM BAC Subversion Server refusing connections Revised

A little background

In April I wrote about our BPM Server installation, that is actually a single host cluster on dev and test. But installed like it was a dual-node  server, so we had a cloned domain.

A BPM installation has a component that is called the Process Asset Manager. Under the hood it uses a replicated SubVersion server. Each node has one, so they had to synchronize. But since we're on the same host, we needed to differentiate in port numbers. Although we used virtual host names for each server node. In an article in april 'BPM BAC Subversion Server refusing connections' I wrote about that.

It turns out: it did not work appropriately. After some investigation, apparently the bac_node1/subversion server calls the subversion server on bac_node2, with it's own address, but with the port of the other:
...
<Jul 24, 2017, 2:37:29,543 PM CEST> <Debug> <oracle.bpm.bac.svnserver.replication> <darlin01> <bpm_server1> <Active Sync Thread [/54680efc-9328-478e-953c-834bbb250725/]> <<anonymous>> <> <20a54a15-d8d8-4e58-a4f6-11a90e992967-00000008> <1500899849543> <[severity-value: 128] [rid: 0:490:13:19] [partition-id: 0] [partition-name: DOMAIN] > <BEA-000000> <[oracle.bpm.log.Logger:debug] About to synchronize against node Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2017-07-12 08:01:13.309, Address=10.0.0.38:37055, MachineId=9002, Location=site:tst.darwin-it.local,machine:bpm_machine1,process:24566,member:bpm_server2, Role=bpm_cluster), url svn://syncuser@t-bpm-1-bpm-1-vhn.tst.darwin-it.local:8424/54680efc-9328-478e-953c-834bbb250725>
...

Of course there's no listen address so unsurprisingly we get errors like:
...
[2017-05-30T12:55:51.704+02:00] [bpm_server1] [ERROR] [] [oracle.bpm.bac.svnserver.replication] [tid: Active Sync Thread [/b91abb78-6b3d-4448-af6a-e82125f261f0/]] [userId: ] [ecid: ed0bc6ce-fefb-4608-8dbe-46f7206a1573-0000000a,0:527] [APP: OracleBPMBACServerApp] [partition-name: DOMAIN] [tenant-name: GLOBAL] org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: E210003: connection refused by the server[[
oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.exceptions.RepositoryException: org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: E210003: connection refused by the server
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.exceptions.RepositoryException.wrap(RepositoryException.java:56)
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.SVNKitRepositorySession.getRepositoryUUID(SVNKitRepositorySession.java:98)
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.RepositorySVNSync.sync(RepositorySVNSync.java:74)
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.RepositorySVNSync.sync(RepositorySVNSync.java:59)
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.ha.aa.ActiveAARepository$Synchronizer.runImpl(ActiveAARepository.java:341)
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.ha.aa.ActiveAARepository$Synchronizer.run(ActiveAARepository.java:304)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)
Caused by: org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: E210003: connection refused by the server
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.wc.SVNErrorManager.error(SVNErrorManager.java:85)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.wc.SVNErrorManager.error(SVNErrorManager.java:69)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.io.svn.SVNPlainConnector.open(SVNPlainConnector.java:62)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.io.svn.SVNConnection.open(SVNConnection.java:77)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.io.svn.SVNRepositoryImpl.openConnection(SVNRepositoryImpl.java:1252)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.io.svn.SVNRepositoryImpl.testConnection(SVNRepositoryImpl.java:95)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.io.SVNRepository.getRepositoryUUID(SVNRepository.java:280)
at oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.SVNKitRepositorySession.getRepositoryUUID(SVNKitRepositorySession.java:95)
... 5 more
Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused (Connection refused)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:350)
at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:206)
at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:188)
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:392)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:589)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.util.SVNSocketFactory.connect(SVNSocketFactory.java:112)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.util.SVNSocketFactory.createPlainSocket(SVNSocketFactory.java:68)
at org.tmatesoft.svn.core.internal.io.svn.SVNPlainConnector.open(SVNPlainConnector.java:53)
... 10 more

]] 

(to get this page searchable).

Solution

But now, since this week, Oracle Support presents us.... (drum rolls)  Patch 26775572 for version 12.2.1.2.0, the official fix for this issue, is finally ready and available for download.
I hope to be able to install it next monday. But feel free to try with me: 'Patch 26775572: BAC node using the wrong port when attempts synchronization with Virtual IP '

By the way, for about 2 months we have diagnostic patch running that solves this. But named patch is the official delivery of our diagnostic variant.

By the way, since 12.2.1.3.0 is out in the field for quite some time already, I expect that this did not landed in that version yet. If you're running in the same issue for 12.2.1.3.0 then create a SR to request for a port of this patch.


Wednesday 15 November 2017

SOASuite 12c: keep running instances using ANT

At my current customer I implemented a poor man's devops solution for Release and Deploy. It was based on a framework created as bunch of Ant projects, that I created years ago. It was based on scripts from Edwin Biemond. See for instance here, here and here. I never wrote about my solution, because although I refactored them quite intensively, the basics were already described thoroughly by him.

What I did was that I modularized the lot, split the environment property files, added logging, added OSB 12c  support, based on the config jar tool, etc.

One thing I ran into this week was that at first deployment from our team to the test environment using my framework, the running instances for the BPM projects were aborted.

Now, if you take a look at the deploy.sarLocation target in Edwin's article about deploying soa suite composites  you'll find that he also supported the overwrite and forceDefault properties.

When re-deploying a composite from JDeveloper you're probably familiar with the 'keep running instances' checkbox. I was looking for the ANT alternative in the ${oracle.home}/bin/ant-sca-deploy.xml scripting. First I looked in the 12c docs (see 47.9.4 How to Use ant to Deploy a SOA Composite Application), but it is not documented there.

But when I opened the particular ant-sca-deploy.xml script I read:
 <condition property="overwrite" value="false">
    <not>
      <isset property="overwrite"/>
    </not>
  </condition>
  <condition property="forceDefault" value="true">
    <not>
      <isset property="forceDefault"/>
    </not>
  </condition>
  <condition property="keepInstancesOnRedeploy" value="false">
    <not>
      <isset property="keepInstancesOnRedeploy"/>
    </not>
  </condition>
 ...
  <target name="deploy">
    <input message="Please enter server URL:" addproperty="serverURL"/>
    <input message="Please enter sar location:" addproperty="sarLocation"/>
    <input message="Please enter username:" addproperty="user"/>
    <input message="Please enter password:" addproperty="password">
      <handler classname="org.apache.tools.ant.input.SecureInputHandler" />
    </input>
    <deployComposite serverUrl="${serverURL}" sarLocation="${sarLocation}" realm="${realm}" user="${user}" password="${password}"
      overwrite="${overwrite}" forceDefault="${forceDefault}" keepInstancesOnRedeploy="${keepInstancesOnRedeploy}"
      regenerateRuleBase="${regenerateRuleBase}" configPlan="${configplan}" scope="${scope}"
      sysPropFile="${sysPropFile}" failOnError="${failOnError}" timeout="${timeout}" folder="${folder}"/>
  </target>

So, the script kindly supports the keepInstancesOnRedeploy property. And thus I implemented a deploy.keepInstancesOnRedeploy property the same way as the deploy.forceDefault/deploy.overwrite properties.

This probably is usefull for Maven based (re-)deployments.

Thursday 2 November 2017

Enable WebService test client on SOA/BPM production mode environments

At my current assignment I need to trouble shoot the identity service because of a BPM->OID coupling. I use the support document 1327140.1 for it, that suggest to test http://<soa-server>:<port>/integration/services/IdentityService/identity

Doing so in a production mode soa or bpm environment, you'll soon find out that it uses the WebService test client via uri /ws_utc, and that this does not work. Resulting in http-404 Not found errors.

First I found a blog of Maarten of Amis mentioning this as well. But unfortunately, he could not get around it either. But luckily I found note 1915317.1, that tells me that the WebServices test Client is not enabled by default.

You can enable it on your domain via the EM:

And then expand the Advanced node:


Check the 'Enable Web Service Test Page' check box.

Since it is about a production mode environment, you need to 'lock & edit'. The note suggests to do that in the /console and then do the change in /em. And back in /console do the activate. I found that peculiar, since you can do it in the change center in /em as well.

You need to restart the servers (apparently including the AdminServer) to get this in effect.

So now lunch and check if my restart worked.

Friday 8 September 2017

Implementing the KeyStore Service with Fusion MiddleWare 12c

For the passphrases, use the passphrases used earlier.Thinking about TLS (Transport Layer Security, the succesor of Secure Socket Layer, SSL) and WebLogic and Oracle HTTP Server, allways gave me Cold Water Fear. You have to create keystores with keys, wallets, certificate signing requests, import signed and trusted certificate chains. Not to mention the configuration of WebLogic and OHS.

Now, creating keystores with the Java Keytool turns out not that hard. And generating the Certificate signing requests and importing the certificates are also a walk in the park, nowadays. The internet world is full of example so I'm not going to do that here.

But lately, our Service Bus developers found that they needed to replace the configured demo identity and trust key stores with Custom Stores. But this broke the connection between the AdminServer and the Nodemanagers, resulting in TLS/SSL Handshake errors. By default, the nodemanagers work with the demo-identities when running in TLS.

This drove us to work out an infrastructural configuration of TLSin our FMW environments, in a  way that the SB developers can extend that with their certificates.

In this article I want to describe how to configure TLSin Weblogic using the KeyStore Service, and also how to reconfigure the nodemanagers to have them running TLS using the custom stores.

Keystores and the KeyStore Service (KSS)

When implementing in TLS in Fusion MiddleWare 12c you have the choice to use the new KeyStore Service for creating keys and certificates directly in the KSS, or the Java Key Tool.

Until now WebLogic preferred a Java Key Store (JKS) for storing certificates. This is a file that functions as a vault to store your keys and certificates savely. You can use the commandline tool Keytool that is delivered with the JDK. But there are several graphical tools, like Portecle, that can make your encrypting life even more simple.

Since a keystore is a atomic file, you need to copy it or put it on a share to have a complete multi-node clustered domain use the same store.

Per Fusion MiddleWare 12c Oracle introduced the KeyStoreService. The KSS is part of the Oracle Platform Security Services, and stores the keys in so-called Stripes in the MDS. For some components it is necessary to sync them to a keystores.xml file in the domain. But we'll get to that.
The KSS enables you to create, delete and manage keystores from the Enterprise Manager/FustionMiddleWare Control.

As said, you can start with creating your keys using the KSS. We however did choose not to. We started with creating a JKS using the KeyTool. The reaons for that were:
  • Using the keytool, you can already create a store and a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) before configuring your domain.
  • We wanted to make sure we had the configuration of Weblogic and Nodemanager correct, before transition to KSS. 
  • With a JKS you have a backup of your identity in case you mess up your configuration. Keep in mind that you need to import the CSR into the keystore from where you generated the key. Even a new JKS created the exact sameway won't work.
  • Using OraPKI, you can migrate your certificates from a JKS to a wallet. We are still in the 'figure-out-phase' of implementing OHS with KSS.
  • Oh, and we wanted to have scripts and easy to document commands for creating and importing the stores.

Identity and Trust Store

So we started with creating  an Identity Keystore with the Java Keytool, created a CSR and had it signed.
We had several virtual hostnames refering to the hostname (darlin001.org.darwin-it.local) loadbalancer (o-dwn-1.ont.org.darwin-it.local), managed servers (o-dwn-1-dwn-1-vhn.ont.org.darwin-it.local), Admin Virtual host (o-dwn-1-admin-vhn.ont.org.darwin-it.loca), etc. To have them accepted with the same certificate, you need to create the Certificate Signing Request with an extention called 'Subject Alternative Names'. This can be done with the -ext parameter including the SAN keyword as follows:
... -ext SAN=dns:darlin001.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1-admin-vhn.ont.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1-dwn-1-vhn.ont.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1-dwn-2-vhn.ont.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1-ohs-1-vhn.ont.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1-internal.ont.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1-admin.ont.org.darwin-it.local,dns:o-dwn-1.ont.org.darwin-it.local
This is a comma seperated list, with each addres need to be prefixed with dns:. See also the keytool documentation.

Don't forget to add the Common Name (CN) to the SAN, since clients are supposed to ignore the CN, when using a SAN. Also you need to add the -ext SAN parameter to the CSR. You can use it when creating the Key, but that's not enough for the CSR.

For the Trust Store, I copied the cacerts from the JDK. I changed the password and imported the CA and root certificates. But you need to consider if you want to accept all the JDK's trusted certificates. Or only those you really need to trust.

 Scope of the Keystore

We choose to have the domain the scope of the keystore, not the host. So as a CommonName I choose the loadbalancer address. The thing is that we want to have the managed servers use the same keystore. And with a whole server migration, a managed server could migrate to a new host, that is not yet in the certificate. Although we add the known hosts, we could be forced to use a new host. And with whole server migrations, you can't way for your CSR to be signed.
As name of the keystores and the identity alias I choose a reference to our domain name. As an environment shortage I choose 'dwn', that could also refer to the type of environment. Like BPM, OSB, SOA, etc. The first letter ('o') denotes the development environment (Dutch: 'ontwikkeling'). And the digit denotes the environment number, where you could have multiple development or test environment.

Import KeyStores into KSS

Having created your KeyStores and made sure Weblogic works with them, you can import them into the KSS. The UI (EM) does allow you to create a keystore, and import certificates. It does not allow you to import a complete JKS. But you can do so using WLST. This caters also for my quest to script as much as possible.

The commands are executed in WLST Online mode, connected to the AdminServer. So start wlst and connect to the AdminServer.

In the following command commands, I use the following environment variables:
  • $JAVA_HOME: refering to, yes, you're right....
  • $JKS_LOC=/u01/oracle/config/keystore
  • $JKS_NAME=o-dwn-1.jks
  • $JKS_TRUST_NAME=o-dwn-1-trust.jks
Connected to your AdminServer you need to get a handle on the 'KeyStoreService object', that has methods to do the imports,  etc.:
wls:/o-dwn-1_domain/serverConfig/> svc = getOpssService(name='KeyStoreService')

With the handle you can import the Identity keystore:
wls:/o-dwn-1_domain/domainRuntime/> svc.importKeyStore(appStripe='system', name='o-dwn-1-id', password='<password>', aliases='o-dwn-1', keypasswords='<password>', type='JKS', permission=false, filepath='/u01/oracle/config/keystore/o-dwn-1.jks')
Already in Domain Runtime Tree 

Keystore imported. Check the logs if any entry was skipped.

The parameters aliases and keypasswords contain a comma-separated list of key-aliases and corresponding key-passphrases.
My advise would be to use the same password for your key as for your keystore. Many products (like Oracle B2B) allow you to provide only one password, that is used for both.

Importing the Trust Store, works similar:
svc.importKeyStore(appStripe='system', name='o-dwn-1-trust', password='<password>', aliases='ca_dwn_org,our-root-ca', keypasswords='none,none', type='JKS', permission=false, filepath='/u01/oracle/config/keystore/o-dwn-1-trust.jks')
Already in Domain Runtime Tree

Keystore imported. Check the logs if any entry was skipped.

One thing with Trusts: they don't contain Keys. So no keyprases are applicable. But the keypasswords property is mandatory and also need to contain the same number of passphrases as there are aliases named to be imported in the KSS. Apparently it is sufficient to use 'none' as a passphrase.

A wallet can also be imported the same way. For a type then choose 'OracleWallet', and in filepath a reference to the wallet folder.

To check the content of the keystore, we can list it:
wls:/o-dwn-1_domain/domainRuntime/> svc.listKeyStoreAliases(appStripe="system",name="o-dwn-1-id",password='<password>',type="*")
Already in Domain Runtime Tree

o-dwn-1

And for the trust:
wls:/o-dwn-1_domain/domainRuntime/> svc.listKeyStoreAliases(appStripe="system",name="o-dwn-1-trust",password='<password>',type="*")
Already in Domain Runtime Tree

ca_dwn_org
our-root-ca

Now the keystores are in the KSS. You can see them in EM. But some FMW components like nodemanagers, (but it appeared to me even Weblogic Servers), don't work right away. They can't look into the KSS, but use a keystores.xml file in the ${DOMAIN_HOME}/config/fmwconfig. This turns out to be an export of the keystores. To synchronize the KSS with that file you need to do:
wls:/o-dwn-1_domain/domainRuntime/> syncKeyStores(appStripe='system',keystoreFormat='KSS')
Already in Domain Runtime Tree

Keystore sync successful.

List the content of KSS with FMW Control

To list the KSS within FMW Control, logon and navigate to Weblogic Domain -> Security -> Keystore:
This brings you to the content of the KSS with the particular Stripes. For Weblogic we used the system stripe to import our custom keystores:

Select a store, and click the manage button in the bar. It will ask for the keystore password (the one you used creating the JKS with the keytool). Then it shows:


Here you can import, export certificates, create keypairs and generate a CSR for it.

Reconfigure Weblogic

Now we can proceed in configuring Weblogic and the nodemanagers.

For the weblogic servers, logon to the Admin console, navigate to the particular Server, tab Keystores and select 'Custom Identity Keystore and Custom Trust keystore' in the pop-list.

Then enter the following values:
Attribute
Value
Custom Identity Keystore kss://system/o-dwn-1-id
Custom Identity Keystore Type KSS
Custom Trust Keystore kss://system/o-dwn-1-trust
Custom Trust Keystore Type KSS

For the passphrases, use the passphrases used earlier.
Then on the SSL tab you can provide the Identity alias and the key-passphrase.

Restart the Server (or at least Restart the SSL, under the control tab).

Reconfigure Nodemanagers for KSS

For the nodemanager, navigate to the nodemanager.properties file in ${DOMAIN_HOME}/nodemanager.
At the top of the file add the following properties:
KeyStores=CustomIdentityAndCustomTrust
CustomIdentityKeyStoreFileName=kss://system/o-dwn-1-id
CustomIdentityKeyStoreType=KSS
CustomIdentityKeyStorePassPhrase=
CustomIdentityAlias=o-dwn-1
CustomIdentityPrivateKeyPassPhrase=

Restart the nodemanager and check if it succesfully loads the kss://system/o-dwn-1-id as a keystore and starts the listener in SSL mode.

Then in the AdminServer console, under Domain Structure -> Machines -> <Machine_Name> check if the NodeManager is 'Reachable'.

Conclusion

That's about it. Don't forget to Sync the KSS in wlst, when the nodemanager does not restart properly and the managed/admin server could not start SSL properly.

 I hope I'll soon be able to write down the directions to reconfigure SSL in OHS to use the KSS. But as said we're still in the 'figure-out-phase'.

Wednesday 26 July 2017

PCS and Correlations: the next big thing cavemen already used...

You can use BPM, BPEL or Workflow to orchestrate or direct regular processes to get a job done from the beginning through a certain flow with a few decision-points, alternate and parallel flows to the end. A common use that is fine and usefull for most projects. And it can be seen as the driver for software companies to develop process/workflow engines.

However, there are cases that one process spawns off multiple other process instances that are some how related to one particular business case, involved person, or a uniquely distinguishable entity. And often those processes have to interact, with each other. For instance, this year in Split I came up with an idea for a role playing advanture game using chatbots and PCS. Each player would initiate a PCS instance, that when interacting with each other can detect if players meet each other at a certain location.

Correlation Sets are key here...

Right after the acquisition of Collaxa in 2004, in my Oracle Consulting era, I got the chance to be a BPEL trainer for Oracle University, doing several trainings for a few bigger consulting companies in the Netherlands. One of the subjects was about Asynchronous Processes and how the Process Manager used WS-Addressing to correlate the response to the running instance that sent out the request. But together with that Correlation Sets were mentioned. And I did not understand it: why would you need Correlation Sets when the Process Manager handles it all transparently using WS-Addressing? Otherwise put: it was time for me to do some projects.

PCS, BPM Suite and SOA Suite share the same process engine that originated from the early BPEL Process Engine. And as you can detect from my anecdote: Correlation Sets are key in this story. And this functionality is around from the medieval ages. In fact, recently they discovered char-coal drawings in a cave in France, indicating that people form pre-historic times already used Correlation Sets in their BPEL's...

Prototype this...

Let's say you have a customer that is a large company with several responsible participants that are allowed to sign the contract. Some of them are full-authorised signers, while others only have partial authorisation. So either one of the fully authorised participants signs, which would complete the contract, or some of the partial signers have signed that pass the contract over the signing threshold.

For this case we keep it simple: either one of the full authorised participant should have signed or all of the partial signers should have signed. But we'll handle this in a (set of) business rule(s), so it can be made more complex to resemble real-world cases.

The singing process spawns off single signing processes for each participant asynchronously:
This is a quite simple looping, as explained in my previous PCS-Article. This can be made simpler using a multi-instance embedded sub-process:

However, for us, this was a later addition.

This single sign process results in a task for the particular signer. When signed it will respond back to the main signing process, that receives the responses of the actual signers:
For every respondent it checks if it results in the contract being fully signed. If it isn't it will wait for a subsequent sign-response. For the technical interested: since this Receive is coupled to the end activity of the signle-sign process:
it is using the earlier mentioned WS-Addressing to correlate each responding asynchronous sub-process to this particular instance. When one or more signers respond just at the moment the process is busy with determining if it has to wait for another receive, these responses are kept by the process manager and delivered at the moment the process instance activates the receive activity again.

Now the thing is, when the contract is fully signed, there still can be several single sign process active. For each of those a task resides in the task-list of the particular participant, but that does not add to the signing-validity of the contract anymore. Those tasks need to be withdrawn:
In this loop, all the signers are checked and for those that did not sign yet, a Withdraw Signing Event is thrown. Correlated to the single signing instance will cause that process to end, removing the particular task from the participants list.

Let's get into the details...

The list of signers is defined as:



We need to know the signers for a contract.  For each Signer we have some attributes. Two toggles are important here:
  • signed: did the signer sign the contract?
  • fullSignAuthority: is the signer fully authorised to sign the contract? 
I also declared a separate object to contain a list of signers. I don't like list based attributes among single attributes. I want to make it explicit that an attribute contains a list of elements.

The main sign process is initiated with a BusinessCustomerSignEvent:
It contains a reference to the Chamber of Commerce number and the account, opportunity and quote id's in SalesCloud or Configure Price Quote Cloud Services. But also the list of Signers component.

When initiating the Single Sign Process, the BusinessCustomerSingleSignEvent is used:
As shown, its the same as the BusinessCustomerSignEvent exept for the signer: it's a single element here. But to be able to identify the particular signer, we introduced a signerIndex.

Then, lastly, there is the WithdrawSigner event:
Here the signer is not particularly important. The correlating attributes are:
  • accountPartyId
  • opportunityId
  • signerIndex
These correlating attributes are defined by the accountPartyId identifying the customer. For that customer, multiple opportunities can arrise. So actually the contract relates to a particular opportunity. And each signer is identified by a sequence/index.

Implementing the details...

First the Single Sign Process is modelled like:


Referring to the Single Sign Process, defining the correlation starts with defining the correlation key:

This pane is called using the 'shuffle'-icon in the button bar, next to the play button.

The Correlation Key is used to identify a Correlation Set, and can consist of one or more properties. Those properties are then mapped to the correlating activities. You define a key using the plus icon. Then you define one or more properties. Then you assign those to the key, using the shuttle icons in the middle.

The  process starts with the Single Sign event, with the interface defined based on the BusinessCustomerSignEvent :

 But the interesting part are the correlations:

In the properties of the Start activity, click on the Correlations tab.
Since it it's a Start event, the only possible choice we have is to initialize a correlation set.
You need to add a correlation key, the one you defined before.

Then map the properties of the key to attributes of the events arguments.

When the Single Sign proces is initiated, the flow splits in a parallel flow. Both conditional paths are based on the condition that the signed attribute is false. If the signed attribute is true, however unlikely, the process is ended.

As can be seen the flow separates into branches leading to a Sign Contract activity, and a Catch  Withdraw Signer Event  activity. So, both are waiting. The Catch event is based on the WithdrawSigner event and is also based on the correlation key:

Here we have the option to Initialize a correlation key. But, in this case this is not quite sensible. We do want to correlate to the earlier initialized Correlation Set. And here we map the properties to the attributes of the WithdrawSigner event activity argument.

Sharp eyes would notice that the Sign Contract Activity has a boundary event on it:
It also catches a WithdrawSigner event, with a comparable correlation set. Actually, this boundary event could have sufficed for our case. But then the process would be boringly simple... And I wanted to show also a construct that allows for intra-process interactions. Here events are thrown and catched between the branches within an instance.

Flowing through the Single Sign process


So, what happens is that either a signer signs the contract, or the main process throws a WithdrawSigner event.

If the Signer signs, the WithdrawSigner Catch event needs to be released. So, in the main flow after the Sign Contract activity, a throw WithdrawSigner event is done:
 It targets the Withdraw Signer event, from the same process. The flow will look like:


This releases the Catch event in the lower flow-branch.
When this signer was a full signer, the main process flows on to do a withdraw of the not signed signer-tasks:
It would be nice to drill down into the decision functions. They're partly used as Script Tasks. And partly to determine the looping. The Check Signing Status checks if one of the fully authorised signers signed, or if there aren't any partial signers that haven't signed yet.

Maybe the most interesting one is the Determine Signers to Withdraw Tasks for:

If the signer has signed, then the signer is removed from the list. This adds to the list functions mentioned in my previous article. The resulting list is traversed to throw a withdraw event for each of the tasks.

If the main process throws a Withdraw Signing Event for an instance, and the signer has not signed then (which is probably the case), it should throw an event to the cancel the Sign Contract boundary event:
What results in a flow like:


And this will remove the tasks from the lists of all the participants.

Conclusion

This was one of the nicest constructs I made in PCS so far. In the "BPEL pre-history" I found that the Correlation Set concept was a very differentiating feature in the Process Engine market. I could not solve some of the more complex problems in the past without Correlation Sets. Maybe this experience made me very fond of this feature. And it's nice to be able to demonstrate it in PCS.

As said, the Boundary event on the Sign Contract activity would already suffice. It turned out I did not need the complex parallel flow with the extra branch to wait for the Withdraw Signer event. But wouldn't you agree this process looks more interesting? It at least also demonstrates how to release blocking paralallel branches within a process.

Friday 21 July 2017

Process Cloud Service and how to loop and select elements from a list

For more than half a year I've been 'dying' to write posts about some of the constructs I've developed in my last Process Cloud Service project. At last I have the opportunity. And I hope I'll be able to write some more. But for starters, one of the problems I encountered is that I needed to process a list of something(s) and select elements from it. Or even better, how to build up a new list based on an input-list and some rules. Oh and do looping, or actually determine how to finish a loop based on a list of elements. Without a count() function in the PCS Expressions...

Questions

If you have met these kinds of problems and the tool at hand is PCS, then you probably ran in (some of) the following questions:
  • Why don't we try to solve this in SOA CS or possibly ICS?
  • Where are the script tasks we have in BPM Suite? (Sorry, this is an obvious one, but still)
  • How to count the elements of a list? Or, where are the functions in PCS?
  • How to add elements to a list?
  • Etc.
To address a few of those...

Many of these things we ran into are actually orchestration issues. And as with the all-time discussions on when to use SOA and when BPM, we advise doing complex service orchestration  (with message processing) in SOA CS, or if possible in ICS. But when we started with this project, the tools we were given were PCS and ICS. And where ICS lacked the more advanced logic processing in the orchestration integrations, at the time (it's improved over time). And sometimes it really is fun to try to accomplish things that were mentioned not being possible. Go where no man has gone before, that sort of stuff.

Script tasks? I guess PCS Product Management gets tired of answering this question. But the real thing is: we do need to do determinations based on the outcome of services. But also doing logic before doing an activity. In the input data association of an activity, you can only assign into the input-arguments of the activity. You can't update process variables. You can do that in the output data-association. But not all activities have a output-data-associations. And there are cases where you don't have an applicable previous activity. For instance in loops.

The case

Let's get into a case. Let's say you have a list of product-subscriptions that your customer has acquired from you. And for some reason some of those products need a review. In our case the customer faces a takeover, and is part of a hierarchy. So you want to fetch all the applicable products in the company hierarchy and add all of those in a list of Review Product Tasks.

The list of products is acquired by calling an ICS service that fetches a list of products from SalesCloudService and calls Oracle Policy Automation to filter the applicable products from the list. That's the list we need to add to the list that should contain the Review Product Tasks for products acquired from all the companies in the hierarchy. The result list looks like:
The cocNumber is the Chamber of Commerce number of the company. For the rest we keep things simple.

The part of interest of the process is:
In the basis, its not that hard. Except for:
  • I don't have an other activity with an output data-association in the loop to do calculations to base my test upon.
  • Again, we don't have script tasks with functions. So I miss-use a decision function as a script task. Which does the job quite well by the way.
  • Oh, and the nice thing of the Business Rules Engine (the same as used in SOASuite and BPM Suite) is that it does have functions. But we'll get into the magic of that in a minute.
The first activity is the service call to the ICS service.  In the output we copy the response message to a DO and it initializes the productIdx to 1. It's a nice example of the fact that we can do (simple) calculations and Data Object manipulations in the output data-association. Those aren't confined to the arguments of the activity.
Within the response message we have a list of products, but of course, those are in the structure of the service definition. We need to copy the elements over to the input of the decision function.

The input of the Add Review Product Task decision function looks like:

The output is:

So in goes the list of products and the product to add. The Decision Functions results into an updated list.
But, how to do that?
First, let's look in to the input data association:

The first rule is to copy the reviewProductTasksDO (the list we're building) to the corresponding input argument. Then the particular product is created by entering the different elements. As said, some where in the structure of the response message of the ICS service, we have a list of products. Using the productIdx variable we select one if the products and that indexed product is copied element by element.

Now, the rule is:

The first 2 conditions are actually declarations of identifiers we refer to in the rest of the rule: reviewProductTask, being the single object as input  and reviewProductTaskList containing the list of reviewProductTasks. Then we only want to add the reviewProductTask if it does not exist, to prevent the rule getting into a infinite loop. Since reviewProductTaskList is in fact an object that has an attribute being a list of reviewProductTask elements, that list contains a set of functions. One of those is the contains() function:
reviewProductTaskList.reviewProductTask.contains(reviewProductTask)

The goal of this function is quite obvious, it returns true() or false(). If the contains() function returns true, then a a call action is performed. And there the magic happens:
reviewProductTaskList.reviewProductTask.append

The reviewProductTaskList.reviewProductTask list also has an append() function. The input of that is the reviewProductTask object variable, the same that went into contains() as a parameter. The real nice thing? This also works in BPM Suite and SOA Suite! Remember? The Business Rules Engine in those products is the exact same thing! To me this was a bit of a revelation. I wasn't aware of the list functions in BRE.

So, now the rule is fired and the list is extended. We need to assign the result to the particular DataObject. So the output data association is:
Quite obvious, again, but the output argument, being the reviewProductTasksOut object, needs to be assigned to the reviewProductTasksDO Data Object. But also the productIdx needs to be increased.

The Decision Function activity loops back to the Exclusive Gateway. How to determine if we're done? Remember we don't have a count() function in the expression builder? The trick is done in the No-transition:





The condition is:
getCriticalProductsResponseMessage4TakeOverCpyDO.data.products.product[productIdx] == null 
When the productIdx is increased and it gets a value greater then the number of product elements in the list, then indexing that (non-existent) product will lead to null. And that can be tested.

And again, it's too obvious, and yet it took me a while to get to this.

The check if we need to get another company in the hierarchy is comparable, only it is indicated by the ICS service. If it is the top-level company, then it has no reference to a parent:
getCriticalProductsResponseMessage4TakeOverCpyDO.data.parentAccountPartyId != null

Conclusion

It might seem so obvious when you read this. And I suppose it is. But, some of those constructs and tests/conditions are not so apparent from the UI. So I hope I have been able to get some of you at the right track.

In one of the follow-up blog-posts I'd like to address Correlations.