This article feels like I should have written years ago. As it is, I haven't, but let's do it anyway.

A few weeks ago a (somewhat older) question on community.oracle.com caught my attention. It was about how to do logging in Oracle SOA Suite. 

This very much possible, and it can be simply done using an Embedded Java activity. However, if you want to have multiple loggings in a larger BPEL process, or have multiple BPEL components in a composite with multiple loggings scattered all over them, then Embedded Java activities aren't that practical.

So, I have developed a bit more sophisticated solution. For just one logging, it is a bit overdone, but I find it more practical with multiple loggings.

It starts with a quite simple Log wrapper class, that I added to GitHub. It is a wrapper around Java Util Logging, and helps with instantiating with a Logger instance. One of the constructors takes in a compositeName and componentName:

public class Log {
    private static final String BASE_PACKAGE="oracle.soa.bpel";
    private static Logger log;
    private String className;
...
    public Log(Class loggingClass) {
        super();
        setClassName(loggingClass.getName());
        log = Logger.getLogger(getClassName());
    }
    
    public Log(String loggingClass) {
        super();
        setClassName(loggingClass);
        log = Logger.getLogger(getClassName());
    }

    public Log(String compositeName, String componentName) {
        super();
        String loggingClass = BASE_PACKAGE+"."+compositeName+"."+componentName;             
        setClassName(loggingClass);
        log = Logger.getLogger(getClassName());
    }

An important aspect here is the static variable BASE_PACKAGE which is set to "oracle.soa.bpel". Which I'll get back to in a minute. The constructor uses this, and the compositeName and compentName to build up a sort of className, that it prefixes with the BASE_PACKAGE.

It also has some logging methods, that requires a methodName, that it uses as an extra identifier for the logging, added to the full class Name.

This class I 'deployed' to a jar file. This makes it reusable in multiple composites, while the source is versioned only once.

 Add it to the SCA_INF/lib folder of your composite:

But you could probably also add it to the oracle.soa.ext_11.1.1 folder in your $MW_HOME/soa/soa/modules folder and run the Ant script there: 

After running Ant in that folder, you should restart the server. The Ant script will add all the jar files in that folder, including yours, to the manifest file of the oracle.soa.ext.jar file in that folder. Doing so, it will be appended to the Classpath of SOA Suite.

To use this in your BPEL, it is important to add the following line at the beginning:

<import location="nl.darwinit.soautils.logging.Log" importType="http://schemas.oracle.com/bpel/extension/java"/>

Like this:

Having done that you can use the Log class in the Embbeded Java activity. To begin with, I find it usefull to add an Embedded Java to a scope which contains simple xsd:string based variables. Using an Assign you can easily assing proper values to the local variables:

The compositeName and componentName variables can be filled with ora:getCompositeName() and ora:getComponentName() respectively. Doing so makes it easier to access these values in an Embedded Java activity. The Java snippet Embedded Java in my example project is:

String compositeName = (String) getVariableData("compositeName");      
String componentName = (String) getVariableData("componentName");      
String text = (String) getVariableData("text");      
String methodName= (String) getVariableData("methodName");      
Log log = new Log(compositeName,componentName);     
  
String message="**** BPEL "+methodName +" " + text +" ****";    
log.info(methodName, message);    
addAuditTrailEntry(message);

The addAuditTrailEntry() shown in this snippet is an API that adds the message to the flowtrace also:

So not necessary for logging and also not specifically in scope of this article, but good to mention.
The message build up in this snippet is a concatenation of: "**** BPEL "+methodName +" " + text +" ****". This maybe handy in the AuditTrail, but in the log you may want to show just the text, like: log.info(methodName, text).

Earlier I mentioned the BASE_PACKAGE variable in the Log class. This refers to the oracle.soa.bpel log-appender. This can be configured in the soa-infra Log Configuration:

And then:

You could add a custom Logger, but it is easier to use an existing one. And to me it makes sense to use the oracle.soa.bpel Logger. If you would choose to use another logger, you would need to change the BASE_PACKAGE variable in the class.

Make sure it has a severity or Log Level low enough to cater for your logging. Set it to the Runtime Logger, but for persistence purpose you probably would need to add it to the "Loggers with Persistent Log Level State". For changing the Runtime logger, you would not need to restart the server. You do need to make sure that the "minimum severity to log" on the server in the WebLogic console.

Before you test, it can be handy to "tail" the diagnostic log as follows:

[oracle@ol7vm logs]$ tail -f DefaultServer-diagnostic.log |grep oracle.soa.bpel

I added my Demo BPEL process also to GitHub. If you test it, the output will be as follows:

So that works! Easy, right?

Now, this works for one simple Log in a BPEL process. But what about if you want to trace the flow using multiple Logs. And maybe even, in fault handlers log particular errors. The scope I introduced can be converted to a subProcess:

 I renamed the SubProcess to Log and then you can remove the Assign:

The scope is replaced with a call activity, that can be renamed. The scope variables now function as call arguments:

You can copy&paste this and rename it to reflect for instance a LogEnd activity:

Testing this, gives the following output:

As can be seen, now a simple log is done using a simple call activity. In this example the Log subprocess is within the same BPEL process, so you could move the setting of the componentName and compositeName variables in an assign in the subProcess, re-enstating the original assign.

However, you could of course move the Embedded Subprocess to a Reusable Subprocess. And then it might be usefull to be able to provide at least the componentName as an argument.

I think it is not so useful to put it in a separate BPEL process that can be called from external composites. In that case you would need to do an invoke with an accompanying assign and variable declarations for each Logging. So I would prefer to define either an embedded or a reusable subprocess for each composite/bpel that you want to do logging in.

Although I experience this article a few years late, I hope it does help.

At my current customer we use JMS queues that are implemented with AQ queues based on sys.aq$_jms_text_message. In Weblogic you can create a so-called Foreign server that is able to interact with these queues over a datasource. For a Weblogic application, like SOA Suite or OSB, it is as if it is a regular Weblogic JMS queue. Pretty smart, because unlike a JDBC based Weblogic JMS Server, you can not only use the sys.aq$_jms_text_message type to query the aq table, as I described earlier. Not only that, you can also use the AQ PL/Sql api's to enqueue and dequeue these messages.

This can come in handy when you need to purge the tables, to remove the expired messages. But this morning there was a hickup in OSB, so that it couldn't process these messages succesfully. Because of the persisting rollbacks the messages are moved to the exception queue by AQ with the reason 'MAX_RETRY_EXCEEDED'. After I investigated the issue and some interaction with our admins the OSB was restarted which solved the problem.

But the earlier expired messages were still in the exception queue and processes were waiting for the response. So I thought it would be fun to have my own script to re-enqueue the expired messages. 

Although the admins turned out to have scripts for this, I would like to have my own. Theirs maybe smarter or at least they had more time to develop.

This script is at least publishable and might be a good starting point if you have to do something with AQ.

declare
  l_except_queue varchar2(30) := 'AQ$_DWN_OUTBOUND_TABLE_E';
  l_dest_queue varchar2(30) := 'DWN_OUTBOUND';
  l_message_type varchar2(30) := 'registersomethingmessage';
  cursor c_qtb 
    is select  qtb.queue_table 
      , qtb.queue 
      , qtb.msg_id
      , qtb.corr_id correlation_id
      , qtb.msg_state
      , qtb.enq_timestamp
      , qtb.user_data
      , qtb.user_data.header.replyto
      , qtb.user_data.header.type type
      , qtb.user_data.header.userid userid
      , qtb.user_data.header.appid appid
      , qtb.user_data.header.groupid groupid
      , qtb.user_data.header.groupseq groupseq
      , qtb.user_data.header.properties properties
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'JMSCorrelationID') JMSCorrelationID
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'JMSMessageID') JMSMsgID
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'tracking_compositeInstanceId') tracking_compositeInstanceId
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'JMS_OracleDeliveryMode') JMS_OracleDeliveryMode
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'tracking_ecid') tracking_ecid
      , (select num_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'JMS_OracleTimestamp') JMS_OracleTimestamp
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'tracking_parentComponentInstanceId') tracking_prtCptInstanceId
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'tracking_conversationId') tracking_conversationId
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'BPEL_SENSOR_NAME') bpel_sensor_name
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'BPEL_PROCESS_NAME') bpel_process_name
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'BPEL_PROCESS_REVISION') bpel_process_rev
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'BPEL_DOMAIN') bpel_domain
      , (select str_value from table (qtb.user_data.header.properties) prp where prp.name = 'SBLCorrelationID') SBLCorrelationID
      , qtb.user_data.header
      , qtb.user_data.text_lob text_lob
      , qtb.user_data.text_vc text_vc
      , qtb.expiration_reason
      --, qtb.*
      from (
        select 'DWN_OUTBOUND_TABLE' queue_table
        , qtb.* 
        from AQ$DWN_OUTBOUND_TABLE qtb
      ) qtb
      where qtb.user_data.text_vc  like '<'||l_message_type||'%'
      and qtb.msg_state = 'EXPIRED'
      and qtb.expiration_reason = 'MAX_RETRY_EXCEEDED'
      order by queue_table, enq_timestamp asc;
  l_payload SYS.AQ$_JMS_TEXT_MESSAGE;
  l_sbl_correlation_id varchar2(100);
  l_parentComponentInstanceId varchar2(100);
  l_jms_type varchar2(100);
  --
  function get_jms_property(p_payload in SYS.AQ$_JMS_TEXT_MESSAGE, p_property_name in varchar2)
  return varchar2
  as
    l_property varchar2(32767);
  begin
    select str_value into l_property from table (l_payload.header.properties) prp where prp.name = p_property_name;
    return l_property;
  exception
    when no_data_found then
      return null;
  end get_jms_property;
  --
  procedure dequeue_msg(p_queue in varchar2, p_msg_id in raw)
  is
    l_dequeue_options dbms_aq.DEQUEUE_OPTIONS_T ;
    l_payload SYS.AQ$_JMS_TEXT_MESSAGE;
    l_message_properties dbms_aq.message_properties_t ;
    l_msg_id raw(32);
  begin
    --l_dequeue_options.visibility := dbms_aq.immediate;
    l_dequeue_options.visibility := dbms_aq.on_commit;
    l_dequeue_options.msgid := p_msg_id;    
    DBMS_AQ.DEQUEUE (
     queue_name          => p_queue,
     dequeue_options     => l_dequeue_options,
     message_properties  => l_message_properties,
     payload             => l_payload,
     msgid               => l_msg_id);
  end dequeue_msg;
  --
  procedure enqueue_msg(p_queue in varchar2, p_payload SYS.AQ$_JMS_TEXT_MESSAGE)
  is
    l_enqueue_options dbms_aq.ENQUEUE_OPTIONS_T ;
    l_message_properties dbms_aq.message_properties_t ;
    l_msg_id raw(32);
  begin
    --l_enqueue_options.visibility := dbms_aq.immediate;
    l_enqueue_options.visibility := dbms_aq.on_commit;
    DBMS_AQ.ENQUEUE (
     queue_name          => p_queue,
     enqueue_options     => l_enqueue_options,
     message_properties  => l_message_properties,
     payload             => p_payload,
     msgid               => l_msg_id);
  end enqueue_msg;
  --
begin
  for r_qtb in c_qtb loop
    l_payload := r_qtb.user_data;
    l_jms_type := r_qtb.user_data.header.type;
    l_sbl_correlation_id := get_jms_property(l_payload, 'SBLCorrelationID');
    l_parentComponentInstanceId := get_jms_property(l_payload, 'tracking_parentComponentInstanceId');
    dbms_output.put_line(r_qtb.queue||' - '||' - '||l_jms_type||' - '||r_qtb.msg_id||' - '||l_sbl_correlation_id||' - '||l_parentComponentInstanceId);
    enqueue_msg(l_dest_queue , l_payload);
    dequeue_msg(l_except_queue , r_qtb.msg_id);
  end loop;
end;

This script starts with a cursor that is based on the query described in the post mentioned above. It selects only the Expired messages, where the root-tag starts with a concatenation of '<' and the message type declared in the top. If there was a JMS type you could also select on the userdata.header.type attribute.

It logs a few attributes, merely for me to check if the base of the script worked, without the dequeue and the enqueue. The selecting of the particular JMS properties are taken from the earlier script and are an example on properties that you could use to more granularly determine if a message is eligable to be re-enqueued.

The found message is enqueued and then dequeued, both with visibility set to on_commit. This ensures that the enqueue and dequeue is done within the same transaction. You should hit the commit button in SQL Developer (or your other favorite Database IDE).

The from clause construct:

      from (
        select 'DWN_OUTBOUND_TABLE' queue_table
        , qtb.* 
        from AQ$DWN_OUTBOUND_TABLE qtb
      ) qtb

is from a script I created at the customer to query over all the available queue tables, by doing a union-all over all the queue-tables. That's why the first column names the queue table that is source for the record. 

This script can be made more dynamic by putting it in a package and make a pipelined function for the query, so that you can provide the queuetable to query from as a parameter. You could even loop over all the user_queue_tables to dynamically select all the message from all the tables without having to do union alls over the familiar queue tables. See my Object Oriented Pl/Sql article for more info and inspiration.

You might even have fun with Polymorphic Table Functions, the Patrick-ACE-Director-Bar-solutions is expert on that.

Last week I had the honour to present on CorrelationSets in a Virtual Meetup, which is a feature that relates to the WS-Addressing support of SOA Suite.

At my current customer, I had to rebuild a BPEL Process from 1.1 to 2.0, to be able to split it up using embedded and reusable  subprocesses.

One requitement is to receive the wsa-Action property and reply it back, concatenated with 'Response'.

Since it implements a WSDL with 3 operations, I need a Pick-OnMessage construction.

To receive properties you can open the activity, in my case the OnMessage:
In the source his looks like the following:

<onMessage partnerLink="MyService_WS" portType="ns1:myService" operation="myOperation"
                 variable="MyService_InputVariable">
        <bpelx:fromProperties>
          <bpelx:fromProperty name="wsa.action" variable="wsaAction"/>
        </bpelx:fromProperties>

With the wsaAction variable here is based on xsd:string.

However, this turns out not to work: the wsaAction variable stays empty.
This turns out to be a bug, that should have been solved since 11.1.1.6, but apparently still works as is. Read more about it in support document 1345071.1.

Solution is simple: just remove the wsa. prefix:

<onMessage partnerLink="MyService_WS" portType="ns1:myService" operation="myOperation"
                 variable="MyService_InputVariable">
        <bpelx:fromProperties>
          <bpelx:fromProperty name="action" variable="wsaAction"/>
        </bpelx:fromProperties>

For invoke, reply, receive and other activities it works the same.

As said, in my case I need to reply with a wsa.action that is a concatenation of the received action with 'Response'. This can be done using an expression:
Again, first choose wsa.action and then in the source remove the wsa. prefix:

<reply name="ReplyMyService" partnerLink="MyService_WS" portType="ns1:myService"
                 variable="MyService_OutputVariable" operation="myOperation">
            <bpelx:toProperties>
              <bpelx:toProperty name="action">concat($wsaAction, 'Response')</bpelx:toProperty>
            </bpelx:toProperties>
            <bpelx:property name="action" variable="WSAction"/>
          </reply>

Testing this in SoapUI or ReadyAPI will show:

<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:wsa="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">
   <env:Header>
      <wsa:Action>http://www.darwin-it.nl/my/myServiceResponse</wsa:Action>
      <wsa:MessageID>urn:1694440c-c69a-11ea-bc81-0050569796a9</wsa:MessageID>
      <wsa:ReplyTo>
...

For more info on setting properties, see the docs.

A few weeks ago I was made aware of a few announcements, which I think makes sense and that I want to pass on to my followers, sauced with a bit of my own perspective.

Containerized SOA

Last year I had made myself familar with the Oracle Weblogic Kubernetes Operator. See for instance my Cheat Sheet Serie. I also had the honour to talk about it during the Tech Summit at OUK in december '19. Weblogic under Kubernetes is apparently the way to go for Weblogic. And with that, also the Fusion Middleware Stack. However, until now only 'plain' Weblogic is supported under Kubernetes, on all Cloud platforms, as well as on your own on-premises Kubernetes platform.

It was no surprise that SOA Suite would follow, and in March there an early acces for SOA Suite on Kubernetes was announced.

In the announcement it is stated that Oracle will provide Container images for SOA Suite including OSB, that are also certified for deployment on production Kubernetes environments. Also documentation, support files, deployment scripts and samples.

Later on other components will be certified. This is good news, because it will allow SOA Suite be run in co-existence with cloud native applications and be part of a more heterogenous application platform. To me this makes sense. It makes High Availability and Disaster Recovery easier, but although the application landscape will be diverse and heterogenous, this makes the maintenance, install, deploy and upgrade of FMW within that landscape more uniformly aligned with other application compents like web applications, possible microservices, etc.

Paid Market Place offering

Another announcment I got recently is about the release of  a "Paid" listing of Oracle SOA Suite for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure" on the Oracle Marketplace. There was already a Bring Your Own Licence offering, that you could bring in to use your universal cloud credits to host your SOA Suite instance in the cloud. You could purchase a separate license, but now you can also use the Universal Cloud Credits  to have a paid, licensed instance of SOA Suite in the cloud, without the need to purchase a license.

And so there are two new offerings in the market place:

• Oracle SOA Suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (PAID)
• Oracle SOA Suite with B2B EDI Adapter on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (PAID)

These offerings include:

• SOA with Service Bus & B2B Cluster, with additional leverage of the B2B EDI Adapter.
• MFT Cluster
• BAM

This will provide better options for deploying SOA Suite on OCI, to:

• Provision SOA instances using OCI
• Manage instances using OCI
• Scale up/down/in/out using OCI
• Backup/restore using OCI.

Oracle's focus on delivering SOA Suite from the Market place. It is expected that current SOA Cloud Service customers will migrate to this offering. The Marktet Place SOA Suite will be enhanced and improved with new capabilities and functions, that not necessarily will be added to the SOA CS.
Probably this will give Oracle a better and more uniform way to improve and deliver new versions of SOA Suite. It also makes sense in relationship to the SOA Suite on Containers announcement.

For new customers the Marketplace is the way to get SOA Suite. Existing customers can use the BYOL offering, but might need to move to the new offering when contract renewal might be opportune.

What about Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC)?

This is still Oracle's prime offering for integrations and process modelling. You should first look at OIC for new projects. Only if you're an existing SOA Suite customer and/or have specific requirements that drive the choice to SOA Suite and related components, then you should consider the Marketplace SOA Suite offering.

This makes the choices a bit clearer, I think.

Years ago, I had plans to write a book about BPEL or at least a series of articles to be bundled as a BPEL Course. I stranded with only one Hello World article.

This year, I came up with the idea of doing something around Correlation Sets. Preparing a series of articles and a talk. And therefor, let's start with an article on Correlation Sets in BPEL. Maybe later on I could pick up those earlier plans again.

You may have read "BPEL", and tend to skip this article. But wait, if you use BPM Suite: the Oracle BPM Process Engine is the exact same thing as the BPEL Process engine! And if you use the Processes module of Oracle Integration Cloud: it can use Correlation Sets too. Surprise: again it uses the exact same Process Engine as Oracle SOA Suite BPEL and Oracle BPM Suite.

Why Correlation Sets?

Now, why Correlation Sets and what are those? You may be familiar with OSB or maybe Mulesoft, or other integration tools.
OSB is a stateless engine. What comes in is executed at once until it is done. So, services in OSB are inherently synchronous and short-lived. You may argue that you can do Asynch Services in OSB. But those are in fact "synchronous" one-way services. Fire & Forget, as you will. They are executed right away (hence the quoted synchronous) , until it is done. But the calling application does not expect a result (and thus asynchronous in the sense that the caller won't wait).

You could, and I have done it actually, create asynchronous request response services in OSB. Asynchronous Request Response services are actually two complementary one way fire & forget services. For such a WSDL both services are defined in different port types: one for the actual service consumer, and one callback service for the service provider. Using WS-Addressing header elements the calling service will provide a ReplyTo callback-endpoint and a MessageId to be provided by the responding service as an RelatesTo MessageId.

This RelatesTo MessageId serves as a correlation id, that maps to the initiating MessageId. WS- Addressing is a Webservice standard that describes the SOAP Header elements to use. As said, you can do this in OSB, OSB even has the WS-Addressing namespaces already defined. However, you have to code the determination and the setting of the MessageId and ReplyTo-Address yourself.

Because of the inherently stateless foundation of OSB the services are short-lived and thats why OSB is not suitable for long running processes. The Oracle SOASuite BPEL engine on the other hand, is designed to orchestrate Services (WebServices originally, but from 12c onwards REST Services as well) in a statefull way. This makes BPEL suitable for long running transactions as well. Because of that after the acquisition of Collaxa, the company who created the BPEL Engine, Oracle decided to replace it's own database product Oracle Workflow (OWF) with BPEL.  And SOA Suite and it's BPEL engine natively support WS-Addressing. Based upon an Async Request/Response WSDL it will make sure it adds the proper WS-Addressing elements and has a SOAP Endpoint to catch response messages. Based upon the RelatesTo message id  in the response it will correlate the incoming response with the proper BPEL process instance that waits for that message.

A BPEL process may run from a few seconds, to several minutes, days, months, or potentially even years. Although experience learned us that we wouldn't recommend BPEL services to run for longer than a few days. For real long running process you should choose BPM Suite or Oracle Integration Cloud/Process.

WS-Addressing helps in correlating response messages to requests that are sent out previously. But, it does not correlate Ad-Hoc messages. When a process runs for more than a few minuts, chances are that the information stored within the process is changed externally. A customer waiting for a some process may have relocated or even died. So you may need to interact with a running process. You want to be able to send a message with the changed info to the running process instance. And you want to be sure that the engine correlates the message to the correct instance. Correlation Sets help with these ad-hoc messages that may or may not be send at any time during the running of the process.

An example BPEL process

Let's make a simple customer processing process that reads an xml file and processes it and writes it back to an xml file.
My composite looks like:
It has two File Adapter definitions, an exposed service that polls on the /tmp/In folder for customer*.xml files. And a reference service that writes an xml file into the /tmp/Out folder as customer%SEQ%_%yyMMddHHmmss%.xml. I'm not going to explain how to setup the File adapters, that would be another course-chapter.

For both adapters I created the following XSD:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:cmr="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/xsd/demo/Customer"
            targetNamespace="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/xsd/demo/Customer" elementFormDefault="qualified">
  <xsd:element name="customer" type="cmr:CustomerType">
    <xsd:annotation>
      <xsd:documentation>A customer</xsd:documentation>
    </xsd:annotation>
  </xsd:element>
  <xsd:complexType name="CustomerType">
    <xsd:sequence>
      <xsd:element name="id" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="firstName" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="lastName" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="lastNamePrefixes" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0"/>
      <xsd:element name="gender" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="streetName" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="houseNumber" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="country" maxOccurs="1" type="xsd:string"/>
    </xsd:sequence>
  </xsd:complexType>
</xsd:schema>

(Just finishing this article, I encounter that I missed a city element. It does not matter for the story, but in the rest of the example I use the country field for city.)

The first iteration of the BPEL process just receives the file from the customerIn adapter, assigns it to the the input variable of the invoke of the customerOut adapter and invokes it:

Deploy it to the SOA Server and test it:

[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls ../TestFiles/
customer1.xml  customer2.xml
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ cp ../TestFiles/customer1.xml .
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls
customer1.xml
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls
customer1.xml
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls
customer1.xml
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls ../Out/
customer2_200617125051.xml
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$

The output customer hasn't changed and is just like the input:

[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ cat ../Out/customer2_200617125051.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><customer xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/xsd/demo/Customer ../Schemas/Customer.xsd" xmlns="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/xsd/demo/Customer">
  <id>1001</id>
  <firstName>Jean-Michel</firstName>
  <lastName>Jarre</lastName>
  <gender>M</gender>
  <streetName>Rue d'Oxygene</streetName>
  <houseNumber>4</houseNumber>
  <country>Paris</country>
</customer>

[oracle@darlin-ind In]$

This process is now rather short-lived and doesn't do much except for moving the contents of the file. Now, let's say that this processing of the file takes quite some time and but during the processing the customer can have relocated, or died or has otherwise changed it's information.

I expanded my composite with a SOAP Service, based on a One-Way WSDL, that is based upon the same xsd:
And this is how I changed the BPEL:




In this example, after setting the customer to the customerOut variable, there is a long running  "customer processing" sequence, that takes "about" 5 minutes.

But in parallel it now also listens to the UpdateCustomer partnerlink using a Receive. This could be done in a loop to also receive more follow-up messages.

This might look like a bit unnecessarily complex, with the throw and catch combination. But the thing with the Flow activity is that it completes only when all the branches are completed. So, you need a means to "kill" the Receive_UpdateCustomer activity. Adding  a Throw activity does this nicely. Although the activity is colored red, this is not an actual Fault exception. I use it here as a flow-control activity. It just has a simple fault name, that I found the easiest to enter in the source:

<throw name="ThrowFinished" faultName="client:Finished"/>

This is because you can just use the client namespace reference. While in the designer you should provide a complete namespace URI:

Same counts for the Catch, after creating one, it's easier to add the namespace from the source:

        <catch faultName="client:Finished">
          <assign name="AssignInputCustomer">
            <copy>
              <from>$ReceiveCustomer_Read_InputVariable.body</from>
              <to expressionLanguage="urn:oasis:names:tc:wsbpel:2.0:sublang:xpath1.0">$Invoke_WriteCustomerOut_Write_InputVariable.body</to>
            </copy>
          </assign>
        </catch>

Side-note: did you know that if you click on an activity or scope/sequence in the Designer and switch to the source, the cursor will be moved to the definition of the activity you selected? To me this often comes handy with larger BPELs.

By throwing the Finished exception the flow activity is left and by that all the unfinished branches are also closed and by that the Receive is quit too.

When you get a SOAP message in the bpel example above you would still wait for finishing the process branch. You probably also need to notify the customer processing branch that the data is changed. That can be done in the same way, by doing a throw of a custom exception.

How to define Correlation Sets

The example above won't work as is. Because, how does BPEL know to which process instance the message has to be sent? We need to create a Correlation set. And to do so we need to define how we can correlate the UpdateCustomer message to the customerIn message. Luckily there is a Customer.id field. For this example that will do. But keep in mind: you can have multiple processes running for a customer. So you should add something that will identify the instance.

You can add and edit correlation sets on the invoke, receive, and pick/onMessage activities. But also from the BPEL menu:




Then you can define a Correlation Set:


As you can see you can create multiple Correlation Sets, each with one or more properties. In the last window, create a property, then select it for the Correlation Set and click ok. Up to the first dialog.


You'll see that the Correlation Set isn't valid yet. What misses, what I didn't provide in the last dialog, are the property aliases. We need to map the properties to the messages.
I find it convenient to do that on the activities, since we also need to couple the correlation Sets to particular Invoke, Receive, and/or Pick/OnMessage activities. Let's begin with the first receive:


Select the Correlations tab, and add the Correlation Set. Since this is the activity that the Customer Id first appears in a message in the BPEL processe, we need to initiate the Correlation Set. This can also be done on an invoke, when calling a process that may cause multiple ad-hoc follow-up messages. So, set the Initiate property to yes.
Also, here you can have multiple correlation sets on an activity.

Then click the edit (pencil) button to edit the Correlation Set. And add a property alias:

To find the proper message type, I find it convenient to go through the partnerlink node, then select the proper WSDL. From that WSDL choose the proper message type. Now, you would think you could select the particular element. Unfortunately, it is slightly less user-friendly. After choosing the proper message type in the particular WSDL, click in the query field and type CTRL-Space. A balloon will pop up with the possible fields and when the field has a child element, then a follow-up balloon will pop-up. Doing so, finish your xpath, and click as many times on Ok to get all the dialogs closed properly.

Another side-node, the CTRL-Space way of working with balloons also works with the regular expression builder in with creating Assign-Copy-rules. Sometimes I get the balloons un-asked for, which I actually find annoying sometimes.

Do the same for the customer update Receive:
Here it is important to select No for the initate: we now adhere to the initiated Correlation Set.

Wrap this up, deploy the composite and test.

Test Correlations

As in the first version copy an xml file to the /tmp/In folder. This results in a following BPEL Flow:

The yellow-highlighted activities are now active. So, apparently it waits for a Receive and for the processing (Wait activity).

From the flow trace you can click on the compositename, besides the instance id, and then click on the Test button:
And enter new values for your customer:


In the bottom right corner you can click on the "Test Web Service" button, and from the resulting Response tab you can click on the launch flow trace.

You'll find that the Receive has been done, and the Assign after that as well. Now, only the Wait activity is active.


After processing the flow it throws a Finished exception, and finishes the BPEL Flow.
In this case the Receive was earlier than finisihing the Wait activity. So, in this flow the throw is unnecessary, but when the message wasn't received, then the throw is needed.

Looking in the /tmp/Out folder we see that the file is updates neatly from the Update:

[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ ls ../Out/
customer2_200617125051.xml  customer3_200619160921.xml
[oracle@darlin-ind In]$ cat ../Out/customer3_200619160921.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><ns1:customer xmlns:ns1="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/xsd/demo/Customer">
            <ns1:id>1001</ns1:id>
            <ns1:firstName>Jean-Michel</ns1:firstName>
            <ns1:lastName>Jarre</ns1:lastName>
            <ns1:lastNamePrefixes/>
            <ns1:gender>M</ns1:gender>
            <ns1:streetName>Equinoxelane</ns1:streetName>
            <ns1:houseNumber>7</ns1:houseNumber>
            <ns1:country>Paris</ns1:country>
        </ns1:customer>[oracle@darlin-ind In]$

A bit of techie-candy

Where is all this beautifull stuff registered?
First of all, for the Correlation properties, you will find a new WSDL has appeared:

At the top of the source of the BPEL you'll find the following snippet:

 <bpelx:annotation>
    <bpelx:analysis>
      <bpelx:property name="propertiesFile">
        <![CDATA[../WSDLs/ProcessCustomer_properties.wsdl]]>
      </bpelx:property>
    </bpelx:analysis>
  </bpelx:annotation>
  <import namespace="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/adapter/file/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/customerIn"
          location="../WSDLs/customerIn.wsdl" importType="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" ui:processWSDL="true"/>

Here you see a reference to the properties wsdl. Also an import of the customerIn.wsdl. Let's take a look in there:

<?xml version= '1.0' encoding= 'UTF-8' ?>
<wsdl:definitions
     name="customerIn"
     targetNamespace="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/adapter/file/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/customerIn"
     xmlns:tns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/adapter/file/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/customerIn"
     xmlns:jca="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/wsdl/jca/"
     xmlns:plt="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2003/05/partner-link/"
     xmlns:pc="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/"
     xmlns:imp1="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/xsd/demo/Customer"
     xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
     xmlns:cor="http://xmlns.oracle.com/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/ProcessCustomer/correlationset"
     xmlns:bpel="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/process/executable"
     xmlns:vprop="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/varprop"
     xmlns:ns="http://oracle.com/sca/soapservice/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/Customer"
    >
    <plt:partnerLinkType name="Read_plt">
        <plt:role name="Read_role">
            <plt:portType name="tns:Read_ptt"/>
        </plt:role>
    </plt:partnerLinkType>
    <vprop:propertyAlias propertyName="cor:customerId" xmlns:tns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/adapter/file/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/customerIn"
         messageType="tns:Read_msg" part="body">
        <vprop:query>imp1:id</vprop:query>
    </vprop:propertyAlias>
    <vprop:propertyAlias propertyName="cor:customerId" xmlns:ns13="http://oracle.com/sca/soapservice/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/Customer"
         messageType="ns13:requestMessage" part="part1">
        <vprop:query>imp1:id</vprop:query>
    </vprop:propertyAlias>
    <wsdl:import namespace="http://oracle.com/sca/soapservice/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/Customer"
         location="Customer.wsdl"/>
    <wsdl:import namespace="http://xmlns.oracle.com/CorrelationDemo/CorrelationDemo/ProcessCustomer/correlationset"
         location="ProcessCustomer_properties.wsdl"/>

Below the partnerLinkType you find the propertyAliases.
Especially with older, migrated processes, this might be a bit tricky, because you might get the property aliases not in the wsdl you want. Then you need to register the proper wsdl in the BPEL and move the property aliases to the other wsdl, together with the vprop namespace declaration.
When you move the WSDL to the MDS for reuse, move the property aliases to another wrapper WSDL. You shouldn't move the property aliases to the MDS with it. Because they belong to the process and shouldn't be shared, but also it makes it impossible for the designer to change. I'm not sure if it even would work. Probably it does, but you should not have that.

As I mentioned before, you can have multiple Correlation Sets in your BPEL (or BPMN) process and even on an activity. In complex interactions this may make perfectly sense. For instance when there is overlap. You  may have initiated one Correlation Set on an earlier Invoke or Receive, and use that to correlate to another message in a Receive. But that message may have another identifying field that can be used to correlate with other interactions. And so you may have a non-initiating Correlation Set on an activity that initiates another one. Maybe even based on different property-aliases on the same message.

Pitfalls

Per CorrelationSet you can have multiple properties. They are concatenated on to a string. Don't use too many properties to make-up the correlation set. Perferably only one. And use short scalar elements for the properties. In the past the maximum length was around 1000 characters. I've no idea what it is now. But multiple properties and property aliases may make it error-prone. During the concatenation, a different formatting may occur. It is harder to check, validate if the correlation elements in the messages conform with eachother.

In the example above I used the customer id for the correlation property. This results in an initiated correlation set where the UpdateCustomer Receive is listening for. If you would initiate another process instance for the same customer, the process engine will find at the UpdateCustomer Receive that there already is a (same) Receive with the same Correlation Set. And will fail. The process engine identifies the particular activity in the process definition and the combination process-activity and Correlation Set is unique. A uniqueness violation at this point will result in a runtime fault.

It doesn't matter if the message is initiate before of after the Receive is activated. If you would be so fast to issue an UpdateCustomer request before the process instance has activated the Receive, then it will be stored in a table, and picked up when the Receive activity is reached.

Conclusion

This may be new to you and sound very sophisticated. Or, not of course, if you were already familiar with it. If this is new to you: it was already in the product when Oracle acquired it in 2004!
And not only that, you can use it in OIC Processes as well. Also for years. I wrote about that in 2016.

More on correlation sets, check out the docs.

Introduction

Several years ago I blogged about automatic creation of Fusion Middleware environments.
See for instance this article on installation, this one on the domain creation and these notes.

In between I wrote several articles on issues I got, start/stop scripts, etc.

Later I found out about Vagrant and since then I worked with that. And this I enhanced through the years, for instance, nowadays I use different provisioners to setup my environment.

Until this week I struggeled with a Oracle Linux 7 Update 7 box, as I wrote earlier this week.

For my current customer I needed to create a few B2B environments. So I got back to my vagrant projects and scripts and build a Vagrant project that can create a SOA/BPM/OSB+B2B environment.

You can find it on GitHub in my ol77_soa12c project, with the scripts in this folder.

You'll need to get a Oracle Linux 7U7 Vagrant base box yourself. I tried to create one based on the simple base box of Oracle, as I wrote earlier this year. But in the end I created a simple base install of OL7U7, with one disk, and a Server with GUI package, a vagrant user (with password vagrant). As you can read in earlier articles.

Also  you'll need to download the installer zips from edelivery.oracle.com.

Modularisation

What I did with my scripts in this revision, is that I split up the main method of the domain creation script:

#
def main():
  try:
    #
    # Section 1: Base Domain + Admin Server
    createBaseDomain()
    #
    # Section 2: Extend FMW Domain with templates
    extendFMWDomain()
    #
    # Section 3: Create Domain Datasources
    createDatasources()
    #
    # Section 4: Create UnixMachines, Clusters and Managed Servers
    createMachinesClustersAndServers()
    #
    # Section 5: Add Servers to ServerGroups.
    addFMWServersToGroups()
    #
    print('Updating the domain.')
    updateDomain()
    print('Closing the domain.')
    closeDomain();
    #
    # Section 6: Create boot properties files.
    createBootPropertiesForServers()
    #
    # Checks
    print('\n7. Checks')
    print(lineSeperator)    
    listServerGroups(domainHome)
    #
    print('\nExiting...')
    exit()
  except NameError, e:
    print 'Apparently properties not set.'
    print "Please check the property: ", sys.exc_info()[0], sys.exc_info()[1]
    usage()
  except:
    apply(traceback.print_exception, sys.exc_info())
    stopEdit('y')
    exit(exitcode=1)

All the secions I moved to several sub-functions. I added an extra section for Checks and validations. One check I added is to list the server groups of the domain servers. But I may envision other validations later.

Policy Manager

Another thing is that in the method addFMWServersToGroups() I changed the script so that it complies to the topology suggestions from the Oracle Product management. Important aspect here is that for SOA, OSB and BAM it is important to determine if you want a domain with only one of these products, or that you create a combined domain. By default these products will have the Oracle Webservice Managment Policy Manager targetted in to the particular cluster or server. However, you should have only one PolicyManager per domain. So, if you want a combined domain with both SOA and OSB, then you would need to create a separate WSM_PM cluster. This is done using the wsmEnabledcproperty in the fmw.properties file. Based on this same property the server groups are added:

#
# Add a FMW server to the appropriate group depending on if a separate WSM PM Cluster is added.
def addFMWServerToGroups(server, svrGrpOnly, srvGrpComb):
  if wsmEnabled == 'true':
    print 'WSM Disabled: add server group(s) '+",".join(svrGrpOnly)+' to '+server
    setServerGroups(server, svrGrpOnly)
  else:
    print 'WSM Enabled: add server group(s) '+",".join(srvGrpComb)+' to '+server
    setServerGroups(server, srvGrpComb)  
#
# 5. Set Server Groups to the Domain Servers
def addFMWServersToGroups():
  print('\n5. Add Servers to ServerGroups')
  print(lineSeperator)
  cd('/')
  #print 'Add server groups '+adminSvrGrpDesc+ ' to '+adminServerName
  #setServerGroups(adminServerName, adminSvrGrp)     
  if osbEnabled == 'true':
    addFMWServerToGroups(osbSvr1, svrGrpOnly, srvGrpComb)
    if osbSvr2Enabled == 'true': 
      addFMWServerToGroups(osbSvr2, osbSvrOnlyGrp, osbSvrCombGrp)
  if soaEnabled == 'true':
    addFMWServerToGroups(soaSvr1, soaSvrOnlyGrp, soaSvrCombGrp)
    if soaSvr2Enabled == 'true': 
      addFMWServerToGroups(soaSvr2, soaSvrOnlyGrp, soaSvrCombGrp)
  if bamEnabled == 'true':
    addFMWServerToGroups(bamSvr1, bamSvrOnlyGrp, bamSvrCombGrp)
    if bamSvr2Enabled == 'true':  
      addFMWServerToGroups(bamSvr2, bamSvrOnlyGrp, bamSvrCombGrp)
  if wsmEnabled == 'true':
    print 'Add server group(s) '+",".join(wsmSvrGrp)+' to '+wsmSvr1+' and possibly '+wsmSvr2
    setServerGroups(wsmSvr1, wsmSvrGrp)
    if wsmSvr2Enabled == 'true': 
      setServerGroups(wsmSvr2, wsmSvrGrp)
  if wcpEnabled == 'true':
    print 'Add server group(s) '+",".join(wcpSvrGrp)+' to '+wcpSvr1+' and possibly '+wcpSvr2
    setServerGroups(wcpSvr1, wcpSvrGrp)
    if wcpSvr2Enabled == 'true': 
      setServerGroups(wcpSvr2, wcpSvrGrp)
  print('Finished ServerGroups.')

The groups are declared at the top:

# ServerGroup definitions
# See also: https://blogs.oracle.com/soa/soa-suite-12c%3a-topology-suggestions
#adminSvrGrp=["JRF-MAN-SVR"]
osbSvrOnlyGrp=["OSB-MGD-SVRS-ONLY"]
osbSvrCombGrp=["OSB-MGD-SVRS-COMBINED"]
soaSvrOnlyGrp=["SOA-MGD-SVRS-ONLY"]
soaSvrCombGrp=["SOA-MGD-SVRS"]
bamSvrOnlyGrp=["BAM12-MGD-SVRS-ONLY"]
bamSvrCombGrp=["BAM12-MGD-SVRS"]
wsmSvrGrp=["WSMPM-MAN-SVR", "JRF-MAN-SVR", "WSM-CACHE-SVR"]
wcpSvrGrp=["SPACES-MGD-SVRS","PRODUCER_APPS-MGD-SVRS","AS-MGD-SVRS","DISCUSSIONS-MGD-SVRS"]
wccSvrGrp=["UCM-MGD-SVR"]

For SOA, OSB and BAM you see that there is a default or "combined" server group, and a "server only" group. If wsmEnabeld is false, then the combined group is used and then the Policy Manager is added to the managed server or cluster. If it is true then the "only"-group is used.

Other Remarks

An earlier project I did failed when creating the domain. Somehow I had to run it twice to get the domain created. Somehow this is solved.

In my scripts I still use the 12.2.1.3 zips. But the scripts are quite easiliy adaptable for 12.2.1.4. I'll do that in the near future hopefully. But my current customer still uses this version. So, I went from here.

The project also adapts the nodemanager properties, creates a nodemanager linux service, and copies start stop scripts. However, I missed the bit of setting the listener port and type (plain or SSL) of the nodemanager in the Machine definition. So starting the domain needs a little bit of tweaking.

And for my project I need at 3 environments. So I need to downsize the database and the managed servers so that I can run it in 6GB, and can have 2 VMs on my 16GB laptop.

And I need to add a bridged network adapter to the Vagrant project, so that I can have the environments connect to each other.

In the past few months, at our current customer we are having a "robustness project" to improve our SOA Suite implementation. We had a lot of duplication and it turned out that we had a lot of WSDLs in our composite projects. Many of those are a result of BPEL projects from 10g. But some of them weren't possible to move because it would break the project.

The first projects where I encountered the problem were projects with Mediators. After moving the WSDLs to MDS, most of our SoapUI/ReadyAPI unit test worked, except for those simulating a SOAP Fault. It seemed that the Mediator could not map the SOAP Fault. I searched "me an accident", we would say in Holland. But without any luck.

Actually, I can't find any documents that talks about catching SOAP Faults in SOASuite. Which is a weird thing, because in BPM Suite, sharing the same soa-infra and process engine, there is a preference for SOAP Faults. Because BPM can react with specific exception transitions on SOAP Faults.

So what is this weird behavior? Well actually, SOA Suite, apparently both BPEL and Mediator, interpret SOAP Faults as Remote Faults! So, in BPEL you can't catch it as a SOAP Fault and Mediator can't route it in the correct way. What you would suggest from the UI.

However, just now I found a solution. That is, I found it earlier for Mediator, but couldn't explain it. Since the same behavior can be seen in BPEL as well, I can write down my story.

Normally, if you would add a reference to your composite, it would look like something as follows in the composite.xml source:

  <reference name="ManagedFileService"
             ui:wsdlLocation="oramds:/apps/Generiek/WSDLs/ManagedFileUtilProcess.wsdl">
    <interface.wsdl interface="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess#wsdl.interface(managedfile_ptt)"/>
    <binding.ws port="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess#wsdl.endpoint(managedfile_ptt/managedfile_pttPort)"
                location="oramds:/apps/Generiek/WSDLs/ManagedFileUtilProcess.wsdl" soapVersion="1.1">
      <property name="endpointURI">http://soa.hostname:soa.port/soa-infra/services/default/ManagedFileService/managedfileprocess_client_ep</property>
      <property name="weblogic.wsee.wsat.transaction.flowOption" type="xs:string" many="false">WSDLDriven</property>
    </binding.ws>
  </reference>

What you see here is a ui:wsdlLocation, which should point to a WSDL in the MDS. under binding.ws there is a location attribute that at many customers would point to your concrete WSDL. At my current customer we work with an endpointURI property that is overwritten using the config plan. In any way, the service element of the WSDL is in the MDS or on the Remote Server, if your refer to an external service.

If the external service would raise an SOAP Fault, it can't be caught, other than through a Catch all:




This makes it also hard to interact in the correct way with the fault, to interpret the underlying problem. This service should rename or move a file on the filesystem. And in this case the file couldn't be found. But the remote fault would suggest something else.

But, there is a real easy workaround. I wouldn't call it a solution, since I think SOA Suite should just handle SOAP Faults correctly.

In the composites WSDLs folder make a copy of the concrete WSDL and strip it down as follows:

<?xml version= '1.0' encoding= 'UTF-8' ?>
<wsdl:definitions name="ManagedFileProcess"
                  targetNamespace="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess"
                  xmlns:tns="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess"
                  xmlns:mfs="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/xsd/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess"
                  xmlns:plnk="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/plnktype"
                  xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/">
  <wsdl:import location="oramds:/apps/Generiek/WSDLs/ManagedFileUtilProcess.wsdl"
               namespace="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess"/>
  <wsdl:service name="managedfile_ptt">
    <wsdl:port name="managedfile_pttPort" binding="tns:managedfile_pttSOAP11Binding">
      <soap:address location="http://soa.hostname:soa.port/soa-infra/services/default/ManagedFileService/managedfileprocess_client_ep"/>
    </wsdl:port>
  </wsdl:service>
</wsdl:definitions>

In the service element there is a reference to the SOAP endpoint of the service, in this case simply a local SOA Suite service.

In the composite you need to change the reference:

  <reference name="ManagedFileService"
             ui:wsdlLocation="oramds:/apps/Generiek/WSDLs/ManagedFileUtilProcess.wsdl">
    <interface.wsdl interface="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess#wsdl.interface(managedfile_ptt)"/>
    <binding.ws port="http://xmlns.darwin-it.nl/soa/wsdl/Generiek/ManagedFileService/ManagedFileProcess#wsdl.endpoint(managedfile_ptt/managedfile_pttPort)"
                location="WSDLs/ManagedFileUtilProcess.wsdl" soapVersion="1.1">
      <property name="endpointURI">http://soa.hostname:soa.port/soa-infra/services/default/ManagedFileService/managedfileprocess_client_ep</property>
      <property name="weblogic.wsee.wsat.transaction.flowOption" type="xs:string" many="false">WSDLDriven</property>
    </binding.ws>
  </reference>

Here you change the binding.ws location to refer to the local stripped WSDL. the endpointURI property does not make much sense anymore, but it does not gets in the way.

You also need to change your config plan to contain the following WSDL Replacement:

 <wsdlAndSchema name="*">
  <searchReplace>
   <search>http://soa.hostname:soa.port/soa-infra/services/default/ManagedFileService/managedfileprocess_client_ep</search>
   <replace>http://soasuite12c.soa.darwin-it.nl:8001/soa-infra/services/default/ManagedFileService/managedfileprocess_client_ep</replace>
  </searchReplace>
 </wsdlAndSchema>

This will do a replacement of the endpoint in the WSDL that can be used.


If you deploy this, using the config plan, then amazingly, SOAP Faults are correctly interpreted:


Now, we get a neat SoapFault caught by a specific catch, based on the fault in the WSDL of the partner link.

Again, this works similarly for Mediator.

Last year I wrote about SOA Composite Sensors and how they can be a good alternative for the BPEL Indexes in 10g. This week I was confronted with the "ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column" exception in one of our composites. It was about a process that is triggered to do some message archiving.

A bit about BPEL Sensors

Funny thing is that this archiving process is triggered by BPEL sensor. To recap: you can create a BPEL Sensor by clicking the monitor icon in your BPEL process:
It's the heart-beat-monitor icon in the button-area top right of the panel. Then it shows the BPEL process in a Layered mode, you can't edit the process any more, but you can add, remove and edit sensors. Sensors are indicated with little antenna icons with an activity. You can put them on any kind of activity. Even Empty activities, what adds extra potential reason to use to an empty activity.

If you click an antena icon you can define a series of sensors, but editing them will bring up the following dialog:

It allows you to add variables and possible expressions to elements within those variables to a sensor. And also add one of more sensor actions that can be triggered on the trigger moment (Evaluation Time) that can be set as well.

A Sensor action can be set as:


In 11g we used the JMS Adapter, but apparently that didn't work anymore the way it was in 12c. So, we changed it to JMS Queues. As with compsite sensors, in the BPEL folder, together with the BPEL process you get two files: YourBPELProcess_sensor.xml containing the Sensor definitions and YourBPELProcess_sensorAction.xml containing the sensor action definitions.

When the sensor is activated, a JMS message is produced on the queue, with an xml following a  predefined xsd. In that XML you will find info about the triggering BPEL instance, like name and instance ID, and a list of variable data. Each of the variables defined in the Sensor is in the list, in the order as defined in the sensor.

By the way, BPEL sensors are part of the product since before 10g...

The actual error case

In our case this message archiving process was triggered from another bpel using a Sensor. The archiving process was listening to the queue as defined in the Sensor Action. Picking up messages that are from certain sensors, using a message selector  based on the sensor name.

On the JMS Interface (Exposed Service) of the message archiving process, I defined a set of Composite Sensors, to be able to search for them. This would help in finding the  archiving instance that belongs to the triggering process. Since sensors work asynchronously, they're not tight together in a Flow Trace.

In some cases, we got the following exception in the Diagnostic log:

[2020-03-11T09:19:50.855+01:00] [DWN_SOA_01] [WARNING] [] [oracle.soa.adapter.jms.inbound] [tid: DaemonWorkThread: '639' of WorkManager: 'default_Adapters'] [userId: myadmin] [ecid: c8e2b75e-7aed-4305-84c5-9ef5cf928c7b-0bb833b1,0:11:9] [APP: soa-infra] [partition-name: DOMAIN] [tenant-name: GLOBAL] [oracle.soa.tracking.FlowId: 463993] [oracle.soa.tracking.InstanceId: 762213] [oracle.soa.tracking.SCAEntityId: 381353] [oracle.soa.tracking.FaultId: 400440] [FlowId: 0000N38eGGo5aaC5rFK6yY1UNay100012j]  [composite_name: MyComposite] [composite_version: 1.0] [endpoint_name: DWN_MyCompositeInterface_WS] JmsConsumer_runInbound: [destination = jms/DWN_OUTGOING, subscriber = null] : weblogic.transaction.RollbackException: Unexpected exception in beforeCompletion: sync=org.eclipse.persistence.transaction.JTASynchronizationListener@2d7a86a9[[

Internal Exception: java.sql.BatchUpdateException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

Error Code: 1461 javax.resource.ResourceException: weblogic.transaction.RollbackException: Unexpected exception in beforeCompletion: sync=org.eclipse.persistence.transaction.JTASynchronizationListener@2d7a86a9

Internal Exception: java.sql.BatchUpdateException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

Error Code: 1461
        at oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumer.afterDelivery(JmsConsumer.java:321)
        at oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumer.runInbound(JmsConsumer.java:982)
        at oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumer.run(JmsConsumer.java:893)
        at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.executor.WorkManagerExecutor$1.run(WorkManagerExecutor.java:184)
        at weblogic.work.j2ee.J2EEWorkManager$WorkWithListener.run(J2EEWorkManager.java:209)
        at weblogic.invocation.ComponentInvocationContextManager._runAs(ComponentInvocationContextManager.java:352)
        at weblogic.invocation.ComponentInvocationContextManager.runAs(ComponentInvocationContextManager.java:337)
        at weblogic.work.LivePartitionUtility.doRunWorkUnderContext(LivePartitionUtility.java:57)
        at weblogic.work.PartitionUtility.runWorkUnderContext(PartitionUtility.java:41)
        at weblogic.work.SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.runWorkUnderContext(SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.java:644)
        at weblogic.work.SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.runWorkUnderContext(SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.java:622)
        at weblogic.work.DaemonWorkThread.run(DaemonWorkThread.java:39)
Caused by: javax.resource.ResourceException: weblogic.transaction.RollbackException: Unexpected exception in beforeCompletion: sync=org.eclipse.persistence.transaction.JTASynchronizationListener@2d7a86a9

Internal Exception: java.sql.BatchUpdateException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

Error Code: 1461
        at oracle.tip.adapter.fw.jca.messageinflow.MessageEndpointImpl.afterDelivery(MessageEndpointImpl.java:379)
        at oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumer.afterDelivery(JmsConsumer.java:306)
        ... 11 more
Caused by: weblogic.transaction.RollbackException: Unexpected exception in beforeCompletion: sync=org.eclipse.persistence.transaction.JTASynchronizationListener@2d7a86a9

Internal Exception: java.sql.BatchUpdateException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column
...

Of course the process instance failed. It took me some time to figure out what went wrong. It was suggested that it was due to the composite sensors, but I waved that away initially, since I introduced them earlier (although a colleague had removed them for no apparent reason and I re-introduced them). I couln't see that these were the problem, because it ran through the unit-tests and in most cases they weren't a problem.

But the error indicates an triggered interface: [endpoint_name: DWN_MyCompositeInterface_WS], and in this case a destination: [destination = jms/DWN_OUTGOING, subscriber = null].

Since the process is triggered from the queue with messages from BPEL Sensors these Composite Sensors were defined on variableData from the BPEL Sensor XML. And as said above, the variables appear in the XML in the order they're defined in the BPEL Sensor.

One of the Composite Sensors were defined as:

<sensor sensorName="UitgaandBerichtNummer" kind="service" target="undefined" filter="" xmlns:imp1="http://xmlns.oracle.com/bpel/sensor">
    <serviceConfig service="DWN_MessageArchivingBeginExchange_WS" expression="$in.actionData/imp1:actionData/imp1:payload/imp1:variableData/imp1:data" operation="ArchiverenBeginUitwisseling" outputDataType="string" outputNamespace="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"/>
</sensor>

With the expression: $in.actionData/imp1:actionData/imp1:payload/imp1:variableData/imp1:data.
Because it is a list, there can be more than one variableData occurences. And without an index, it will select all of them. If, for instance one them contains the actual message to archive, and that message is quite large, then the resulting value becomes too large. And that results in the error above.

All I had to do is to select the proper occurence of the message id as shown in the Sensor Dialog above. The expression had to be: $in.actionData/imp1:actionData/imp1:payload/imp1:variableData[2]/imp1:data

Conclusion

This solved the error. I wanted to log this for future reference. But, also to show how to find out this seemingly more obscure error.

Today I'm investigating a problem in an interaction between Siebel and SOASuite. I needed to find a set of correlated messages, where BPEL expects only one message but gets 2 from Siebel.

I have a query like:

SELECT 
  dmr.message_guid,
  dmr.document_id,
  dmr.part_name,
  dmr.document_type,
  dmr.dlv_partition_date,
  xdc.document_type,
  xdc.document,
  GET_XML_DOCUMENT(xdc.document,to_clob(' ')) doc_PAYLOAD,
  xdc.document_binary_format,
  dmg.conv_id ,
  dmg.conv_type,
  dmg.properties msg_properties
FROM
  document_dlv_msg_ref dmr
  join xml_document xdc on xdc.document_id = dmr.document_id
  join dlv_message dmg on dmg.message_guid = dmr.message_guid
  where dmg.cikey  in (select cikey from cube_instance where flow_id = 4537505 or flow_id = 4537504);

To get all the messages that are related to two flows that run parallel based on the same message exchange.
The thing is that of course you want to see the contents of the message in the xml_document. This attribute is a BLOB that contains the parsed document from oracle xml classes. You need the oracle classes to serialize it to a String representation of the document. I found this nice solution from Michael Heyn.

In 12c this did not work right a way. First I had to rename the class to SOAXMLDocument, because I got a Java compilation error complaining that XMLDocument already was in use. I think it conflicts with the imported oracle.xml.parser.v2.XMLDocument class. Renaming it was the simple solution.

Another thing is that in SOA Suite 12c, the documents are apparent

set define off;
CREATE OR REPLACE AND COMPILE JAVA SOURCE NAMED "SOAXMLDocument" as
// Title:   Oracle Java Class to Decode XML_DOCUMENT.DOCUMENT Content
  // Author:  Michael Heyn, Martien van den Akker
  // Created: 2015 05 08
  // Twitter: @TheHeynComplex
  // History:
  // 2020-02-25: Added GZIP Unzip and renamed class to SOAXMLDocument
  // Import all required classes
  import oracle.xml.parser.v2.XMLDOMImplementation;
  import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
  import java.io.IOException;
  import oracle.xml.binxml.BinXMLStream;
  import oracle.xml.binxml.BinXMLDecoder;
  import oracle.xml.binxml.BinXMLException;
  import oracle.xml.binxml.BinXMLProcessor;
  import oracle.xml.scalable.InfosetReader;
  import oracle.xml.parser.v2.XMLDocument;
  import oracle.xml.binxml.BinXMLProcessorFactory;
  import java.util.zip.GZIPInputStream;

  // Import required sql classes
  import java.sql.Blob;
  import java.sql.Clob;
  import java.sql.SQLException;

  public class SOAXMLDocument{

      public static Clob GetDocument(Blob docBlob, Clob tempClob){
      XMLDOMImplementation xmlDom = new XMLDOMImplementation();
      BinXMLProcessor xmlProc = BinXMLProcessorFactory.createProcessor();
      ByteArrayOutputStream byteStream;
      String xml;
      try {
              // Create a GZIP InputStream from the Blob Object
              GZIPInputStream gzipInputStream = new GZIPInputStream(docBlob.getBinaryStream());
              // Create the Binary XML Stream from the GZIP InputStream
              BinXMLStream xmlStream = xmlProc.createBinXMLStream(gzipInputStream);
              // Decode the Binary XML Stream 
              BinXMLDecoder xmlDecode = xmlStream.getDecoder();
              InfosetReader xmlReader = xmlDecode.getReader();
              XMLDocument xmlDoc = (XMLDocument) xmlDom.createDocument(xmlReader);

              // Instantiate a Byte Stream Object
              byteStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

              // Load the Byte Stream Object
              xmlDoc.print(byteStream);

              // Get the string value of the Byte Stream Object as UTF8
              xml = byteStream.toString("UTF8");

              // Empty the temporary SQL Clob Object
              tempClob.truncate(0);

              // Load the temporary SQL Clob Object with the xml String
              tempClob.setString(1,xml);
              return tempClob;
      } 
      catch (BinXMLException ex) {
        return null;
      }
      catch (IOException e) {
        return null;
      }
      catch (SQLException se) {
        return null;
      }
      catch (Exception e){
        return null;
      }
    }
  }
/

Also, I needed to execute set define off before it. Another thing is that in SOA Suite 12c the documents are apparently stored as GZIP object. Therefor I had to put the binaryStream from the docBlob parameter into a GZIPInputStream, and feed that to the xmlProc.createBinXMLStream().

Then create the following Function wrapper:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION GET_XML_DOCUMENT(p_blob BLOB
                                           ,p_clob CLOB) 
                    RETURN CLOB AS LANGUAGE JAVA
                      NAME 'SOAXMLDocument.GetDocument(java.sql.Blob, java.sql.Clob) return java.sql.Clob';

You can use it in a query as:

select * from (
  select xdc2.*, GET_XML_DOCUMENT(xdc2.document,to_clob(' ')) doc_PAYLOAD
  from
    (select * 
    from xml_document xdc
    where xdc.doc_partition_date > to_date('25-02-20 09:10:00', 'DD-MM-YY HH24:MI:SS') and xdc.doc_partition_date < to_date('25-02-20 09:20:00', 'DD-MM-YY HH24:MI:SS') 
    ) xdc2
)  xdc3
where xdc3.doc_payload like '%16720284%' or xdc3.doc_payload like  '%9F630D36DD24214EE053082D260AB792%'

In this example I do a scan over documents between a certain period where I filter over contents from the blob. Notice that database need to unparse the blob of every row to be able to filter on it. You should not do this over the complete table.