Friday, October 18, 2013

Learner Series: Oracle BPEL Receive & Pick Activity With Example

This post is part of the Oracle SOA BPEL learner series.

I have been getting lots of requests to write on basic SOA BPEL use-cases from my blog readers who are starting up on SOA initiatives. One such request that often comes across is the basic difference  between the usage of a pick and receive constructs in a BPEL process.

I have created a working BPEL use-case which contains both pick & receive activities in one SOA project.

A quick introduction to BPEL Pick & Receive Constructs;

Receive Activity: This is the first activity in most of the BPEL processes. As the name indicates, this construct receives information/message from a partner link.

Pick Activity: This activity is very similar to the receive construct. But unlike the receive activity which gets triggered only when a partner link invokes it, the Pick activity has 2 choices (On Message & On Alarm) - It waits for a message from a partner link or triggers another set of activities on timeout.

Use-Case: (Hypothetical but conveys the message)

A BPEL process (ReceivePick) gets a "Customer Name" as input, calls another BPEL process (CustomerCreditScoreWS) to get the customer's credit score. The CustomerCreditScoreWS process validates if the customer name starts with "A" and returns a credit rating immediately; else the process waits for 10 seconds before returning a blank response. The ReceivePick BPEL process waits for a message (credit score) from the CustomerCreditScoreWS process. If it gets a response (On Message: credit score), the process completes by returning a "Success" message; otherwise in the event of not getting a response for 8 seconds (On Alarm: 8 seconds) the process waits and terminates by returning a "Failure".

Receive-Pick BPEL Constructs at a glance
You can download the source code for this sample here

4 comments:

  1. can any body please post the video's related to the above scenario/give some supported video links ......Thanks.....!

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    Replies
    1. vsr,

      I would try to do this in future.. Not doing it for lack of time. However, I have the source code attached with the post. Hope that should get you going for now..

      Delete
  2. Thanks for the information. Really simple and easy to learn. Could you please post for other activities also? It would be really useful for beginers like me..

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