Browsing the Meta Data Services Repository of the Oracle SOA/BPM Suite 11g

In this article I explain a handy way to browse the MDS on the SOA/BPM server from JDeveloper, as well as how to download its content using Enterprise Manager, and finally an (as far as I know) undocumented feature to look up artifacts using a browser.

This article has been updated on November 26 to include the option regarding downloading the MDS content.

The Meta Data Services (or MDS for short) of Oracle's SOA/BPM Suite is used to manage various types of artifacts like:

• Process models created with Process Composer,
• Abstract WSDL's and XSD's,
• Domain Value Map's (DVM), and even
• Artifacts  of deployed composites.

Browsing the MDS from JDeveloper

To find out what actually is deployed in the MDS you can setup an MDS connection within JDeveloper to the server. Such a connection can be handy, for example to verify if replacements of variables in the MDS artifacts are properly done when deploying. Using this connection you can open those artifacts in JDeveloper and check the source.

To create an MDS connection go to the Resource Palette -> New Connection -> SOA-MDS. This will pop-up a tab from which you can create a database connection to the MDS for example the dev_mds schema. Having created the database connection you have to choose the partition to use for the SOA-MDS connection. To be able to check-out processes created whith Composer from the MDS or to save them in the MDS, you create a SOA-MDS that uses the obpm partition. As the name already suggests, this is in BPM-specific partition. To browse the other artifacts I mention above, you use the soa-infra partion, which is shared by both SOA and BPM.

In the figure below you can see two types of connections, above to the soa-infra and below to the obpm partition. In the (soa-infra) apps you can find the reusable artifacts that you have deployed explicitly (like abstract WSDL's, XSD's, EDL's).

What you also see is a deployed-composites folder that shows all composites that have been deployed. When expanding a composite, you will find that all artifacts are shown. This is a much easier way to verify that you do not deploy too many artifacts to the server then by introspecting the SAR file, I would say. Except for .bpmn files (that at the time of writing are not yet recognized by this MDS  browser) you can open all plain text files in JDeveloper.

Downloading the MDS from Enterprise Manager

Now let's assume that you have not been given access to the MDS's DB schema on the environment (perhaps because it is Production), but you do have access to the Enterprise Manager. For this situation my dear colleague Subhashini Gumpula pointed me to the possibility to download the content from the MDS as follows:

soa-infra -> Adminstration -> MDS Configuration  -> and then on the right side of the screen: Export.

This will download a soa-infra_metadata.zip file with its content!

Looking up Artifacts in the MDS Using a Browser

Now let's assume that you also have not been given access to Enterprise Manager on the environment, but you can access using the HTTP protocol. Thanks to my dear colleague Luc Gorrisen I recently learned that you can browse it using part of the URL of the composite, as follows:

http://[server]:[port]/soa-infra/services/[partition]/[composite_name]/apps/[artifact_folder]

For example, to look up the abstract WSDL of some ApplicationService that is used by some StudentRegistration business process, I can use the following URL.

http://capebpm-vm:7001/soa-infra/services/default/StudentRegistration/apps/ApplicationService/1/ApplicationServiceStorage.wsdl

Mind you, this is not restricted to only the WSDL's it is using.

Ain't that cool?!

How to Make File-Based MDS in JDeveloper Work for both Windows and Linux

In this article I explain how you  can modify the JDeveloper adf-config.xml file to make it work for both Windows, as well as Linux.

If in a JDeveloper application you point to artifacts in a file based MDS residing in a Windows folder for example "d:\projects\MDS", then JDeveloper will create an new entry in the adf-config.xml file (that you can find in Application Resources -> Descriptors -> ADF META-INF) pointing to the absolute location of that folder:



The problem with this is that if you have other colleagues that use Linux instead of Window, it's not possible to make it work for both by defining some relative location (as you could do with ant), like "../../projects/MDS", so now what?

As in most cases, the solution is so simple that I successfully missed it many times: use an environment variable! What worked was creating an environment variable with name MDS_HOME, and after that I could use it like this:

Problem solved! Such an evironment variable you can create in Windows as well as Linux.

I have not yet fully tested if this works for everything, like deploying with ant, but if it doesn't I expect you can easily fix that by modifying the ant-sca-compile.xml file in your JDeveloper installation folder by adding a property "mds_home" in there as well.

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.

Why you may consider NOT using the Terminate End Event in Oracle BPM Suite

In this article I explain why you should try to avoid using the Terminate End Event in Oracle BPM 11g.

According to the BPMN specification, the Terminate End Event is supposed to terminate a process instance at the level at which it is raised, including any ongoing activity for sub-processes. But is should not terminate any higher level (parent) process.

With OBPM 11g it works differently (at least up to PS6), as raising a Terminate End Event will actually terminate the composite's instance. Except for human tasks, because as clearly stated in the documentation: "Human tasks are independent from BPMN processes. If you terminate a BPMN process while it runs a user task, the associated human tasks keeps running independently". The reason is that the human workflow engine runs separately from the BPM engine.

In the process below this will result in the situation that the Review Data task will still show in Workspace, while the associated process instance is already terminated. That was not the original intention of this model.

This flow shows what actually happens:


Conclusion: before considering using the Terminate End Event be well aware of its behavior. Consider alternate types of modeling, like raising a business exception that is caught by the parent process, which then uses an Update Task activity to withdraw all human tasks before actually ending. In this way you can prevent any human doing accidentally doing work for nothing.

Such a model would look like this:

Exceptions, Business as Usual?

In this article I describe some aspects considering using BPMN exceptions to handle business exceptions. The conclusion is that you should carefully consider if doing so is appropriate, or that using a combination of a gateway and End event would be a better option.

Bruce Silver writes in his book BPM Method & Style that he used to use BPMN Exception end events only for technical exceptions. For business exceptions he used to use a combination of a gateway and an end state test.

When I first read that I found that to be a peculiar remark, as - coming from a Oracle BPM 10g direction - I used them for business exceptions all the time! Moreover, as most technical exceptions could be caught and managed in BPL (the 10g, Java-like scripting language) I even adviced people to to use Exceptions for technical exceptions only if unavoidable with the argument that the business audience is not interested in technical exceptions, and that therefore they should be left out of the model if possible. After all, wouldn't you agree that the first model (in which exceptions are used for business exceptions) looks simpler that the second one (which is more the gateway/end-state type of solution)?

Using BPMN Error end event

Using gateways

The model presented is inspired by a business process model with a similar complexity, but then bigger. From a functional point of view both models do the same. Examples like this may explain why later on Bruce Silver changed his mind based on feedback from his students.

With Oracle BPM 10g it was easy to write some generic (technical) business exception handling process with a retry option (using the BACK action). With this retry you could simply return to the happy path even when an Exception end event had occurred.

The first time I started to have second thoughts about using Exceptions for business exceptions was when I found that with 11g this back functionality is no longer possible (although it is supposed to come back in 12c in some way or another).

The second second thoughts came when I realized that throwing an Exception and catch that in an Event Sub-process, also has some other peculiarities, as I will explain using the model below:

In this sample model there is an Event Sub-process with a non-interrupting Get Status Message start event, and a Return Status Message end event. This exposes a getStatus services operation that can be called by some 3rd party to find out where the process is, and for that returns a status that is set by the Set Rejected Status and Set Reconsidering Status Script activities. When the Rejected Error event is thrown this is caught by the Event Sub-process with the Rejection Error start event. An Event Sub-process that starts with an Error start event, is interrupting by definition.

Patterns like this (where some operation or service is exposed to interact with a running instance) are very common in my practice. As a matter of fact, as far as I recall more than half of the models I created have a similar Event Sub-process, either to get or to set some process data on the run.

The issue that I found is that when the order is rejected without the option to reconsider - meaning that the Rejected Error event is thrown, the normal flow of the process is aborted (because of the interrupting nature of Error events). As a result, when the process is in the Confirm activity, and the getStatus operation is called, it won't react because that operation it is tied to the normal flow, which is no longer active. In contrast, when the process is in the Reconsider this is not a problem.

It is unclear to me what the BPMN specifications say about this. I can imagine that this behavior is in line with the specifications, or that the specifications are not explicit about what that behavior should be. In any case, this is how it works with 11g, which made me realize that throwing Error end events in case of business exceptions has some drawbacks that might make that modeling by using a gateway plus end state is not so peculiar after all.

OUM approved by Open Group as an Architectural Method

A bit late perhaps to write about it, but as of the middle of July the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) has been approved by the Open Group (responsible for TOGAF) as an accepted architectural method!

I case you did not already do so, you might be interested to know that OUM blends an architectural method with a project delivery method based on the Unified Process. It is therefore reasonable to state that OUM is your "One Stop Development Method" (OSDM). Can I claim this acronym somewhere?

Handling Service Calls from Oracle BPM

In this posting I explain why in Oracle BPM Suite 11g you should consider using reusable subprocesses to handle service calls. The example is based on a synchronous service, but the same holds for asynchronous and fire & forget services.

If you have never experienced during process design with BPMN that the final process model became twice, if not three times more complex than you thought it would be, than you haven't been doing process design for real. You might for example have experienced how, what initially looked like a simple service call, finally exploded in your face. Let me tell you how it did in mine. I made up the example I'm using, but it is not far from reality.

It all started with a simple call to a synchronous service to store an order using some Insert and Update Order Service, or Upsert Order for short. The initial process model looked as simple as this.

This process is kicked off as a service with some initial customer data, after which a SalesRep enters an order that then gets stored using the Upsert Order service. But then I found that to use this service, I had to instantiate some custom request header. So I had to add a Script activity, as you cannot do that in the Service activity itself. The result was this:

But now I was exposing technical aspects in a business process, so to prevent the business audience to get distracted from that, I hid the complexity inside an embedded Store Order subprocess, like this:

And inside the embedded subprocess like this:

 
So far so good. But then I found that I also had to create a message id, log the request and response message, and catch exceptions to forward them to a generic exception handling process because the business might be involved to solve data issues. So before I knew it, my embedded subprocess looked something like this:

Hurray for the embedded subprocess, which hid all this complexity! But then I had to call the same Upsert Order service a second time, requiring me to do all the wiring again. Arghh!! Which brought me to the "brilliant" idea of pushing all this logic to a reusable subprocess, like this:

So in the business process itself, I only have to map the (context-specific) request and response messages to and from, what now has become the generic, and reusable wiring of the service call, like this:

Now you might ask yourself why we did not do the service wiring in PBEL. After all, implementing logic regarding service calls (like exception handling, more complex data transformations) is easier in BPEL. But not every BPM developer is also good in BPEL, making BPMN the better choice from a development process point of view. However, the next evolution could be to create some even more generic Service Request/Response Handler that is capable of calling any synchronous service, taking an anyType input and output argument.

BPM: how to time out synchronous calls to external services?

This article has been updated on November 13, to fix naming a wrong property oracle.soa.local.optimization.force instead of oracle.webservices.local.optimization.

In the Oracle SOA Suite for calls to synchronous services the maximum time a composite should wait for a service to respond, can be set using the SyncMaxWaitTime (which has a default of 45 seconds). For services deployed on the same engine, this also works for the BPM Suite.

However, for the BPM Suite 11.1.1.6 (PS5), and probably all versions before that, this property is ignored for calls to external services (that is, not being deployed on the same engine). A BPMNConfig specific version of this property is not present (yet?).

A work-around is to set the oracle.webservices.httpReadTimeout binding property on each specific reference of the composite.xml, as shown in the picture below. The weblogic.wsee.wsat.transaction.flowOption comes automatically with that.

It is a bit more work, as you have to do that for each individual reference. On the other hand, this gives you the opportunity to set it for one reference different than for another one.

As a matter of fact you don't even have to set these properties design-time. By navigating to the deployed composite, and then go to the Service/Reference Properties, you will see that you can set this property run-time as well. I haven't checked (yet) if you do both which one will prevail. I would guess the run-time one.

Related property is oracle.webservices.local.optimization, which can be set to false to force that the SOA Suite will not optimize service calls by using Java-level calls, but instead use the SOAP stack. This property is not necessary to set for external references, as for that it will always use SOAP. However, you can use it if you want to set it for services calls within the same SOA server.

Another property is the oracle.webservices.httpConnTimeout which can be used to configure the maximum time the composite should wait to connect to the service. You don't have to set that to time out waiting for the response.

Interesting reading regarding Oracle Fusion Middleware timeout settings it a recent posting from Manish Kumar Gupta.