Customizing (or rather Hacking) Oracle BPM 11g Business Exceptions

In this article I explain how you can add custom attributes to Oracle BPM 11g business exceptions. Mind that this is not officially supported.

One of the fun things of giving a training like the Advanced BPM Suite 11g course that I'm running now, is that students ask questions to which you don't know the answer. But hey, you are the teacher, and that won't do, so off you go!

One question asked yesterday was if it is possible to have more attributes on a business exception than just "errorInfo". First question should be: "why do you want that?". Well, let's assume that you at some higher level you want to have access to context information that is only available where the exception is thrown, like a local variable. Of course you can concatenate all info in one long semi-colon separated string or something, but then you probably have to have other logic to transfer that back into something readable.

If you look closely at the definition of a business exception, you will notice that it uses a generated WSDL and XSD. What I did was adding an extra element "name" to the XSD of a business exception with name FailProcess (created for the previous blog article) as follows:

I then restarted JDeveloper to see what would happen, and not totally to my surprise: nothing! As in: it works! I also tried it run-time, and no problem there either, as you can see in the following figure:

One warning though. As the generated XSD clearly states, it should not be altered manually, and any change may be overwritten. It obviously is not a supported hack I show you here, and you should expect that any change of the business exception via the UI will break your code. Therefore let's hope that changes like this in some next version are supported by JDeveloper as well.