Oracle SOA/BPM 12c: Propagation of Flow Instance Title and Instance Abortion

Recently I wrote this posting regarding an improvement for setting the title of a flow instance in Oracle BPEL, and BPMN 12c. In this posting I will discuss two related improvements that comes with SOA/BPM Suite 12c, being that the flow instance abortion is automatically propagated from one instance to the other, as well as the flow instance title. Or more precisely, for every child instance the initiating instance is shown together with its name.

Since 12c the notion of composite instance is superseded by that of flow instance, which refers to the complete chain of calls starting from one main instance to any other composite, and further. Every flow has a unique flowId which is automatically propagated from one instance to the other.

Propagation of Flow Instance Title

This propagation does not only apply to the flowId, but also to the flowInstanceTitle, meaning that if you set the flowInstanceTitle for the main instance all called composites automatically get the same title.

So if the flowInstanceTitle is set on the main instance:

Then you will automatically see it for every child instance as well:

Trust but verify is my motto, so I tried it for a couple of combinations of composite types calling each other, including:

• BPM calling BPEL calling another BPEL
• BPM initiating a another composite with a Mediator and BPEL via an Event
• Mediator calling BPEL

Flow Instance Abortion

When you abort the instance of the parent, then all child instances are aborted as well.

In the following flow trace you see a main BPM process that kicks of:

1. A (fire&forget) BPEL process
2. Throws an Event that is picked up by a Mediator
3. Calls another BPM process
4. Schedules a human task

On its turn the BPEL process in step 1 kicks of another BPEL process (request/response). Finally the BPM process in step 3 also has a human task:

Once the instance of the main process is aborted, all child instances are automatically aborted as well, including all Human Tasks and composites that are started indirectly.

The flip-side of the coin is that you will not be able to abort any individual child instance. When you go to a child composite, select a particular child instance and abort, the whole flow will be aborted. That is different from how it worked with 11g, and I can imagine this will not always meet the requirements you have.

Another thing that I find strange is that the Mediator that is started by means of an event, even is aborted when the consistency level is set to 'guaranteed' (which means that event delivery happens in a local instead of a global transaction). Even though an instance is aborted, you may have a requirement to process that event.

But all in all, a lot easier to get rid of a chain of processes instances than with 11g!!