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Ant Utility
The Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides the Ant utility called obant. This can be used to configure complex compilation and deployment scenarios. obant is just a wrapper around standard Ant, which sets the environment and then invokes the standard Ant Java task. To use it we have to prepare the corresponding project file, usually called build.xml. The project file for our travel example process is shown below:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="TravelProcessCh4" default="main" basedir=".">
<property name="deploy" value="default"/>
<property name="rev" value="1.0"/>
<target name="main">
<bpelc home="${home}" rev="${rev}" deploy="${deploy}"/>
</target>
</project>
(continued)For more information on Ant, visit http://ant.apache.org/.
To compile and deploy our BPEL process we simply start obant from the command line. The output is shown in the following screenshot:
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Process Management with BPEL Console
Now that we have successfully deployed a BPEL process on the Oracle BPEL Server, let's execute it. In Chapter 2 we mentioned that each BPEL process is a web service. Therefore, to start the BPEL process we need to invoke it just like any other web service. This requires writing a web services client based on the WSDL. Because web services are not bound to a particular platform or programming language, we can do this using most languages (Java, C#, VB.NET, Delphi, etc.), applications (SAP, Navision, even Microsoft Office), tools (XML Spy), or other BPEL processes.
In addition to these options, Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides a BPEL Console through which we can execute, monitor, manage, and debug BPEL processes on a BPEL Server domain. The BPEL Console is accessible at http://localhost:9700/BPELConsole/. We can replace localhost with the valid computer name URL. Once we enter the domain password we can start our travel process and create a new process instance by clicking the process name (TravelProcessCh4) on the BPEL Console dashboard, shown in the following screenshot:
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Note that in addition to the Travel Process, the Employee, American Airline, and Delta Airline web services have to be deployed as well. After clicking TravelProcessCh4 we have to enter the input XML message (the default from the process descriptor is shown in the first screenshot) and click the Post XML Message button.
Alternatively, we can switch to the HTML form and necessary fields. This is shown in the second screenshot on the following page.
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We now get a screen notifying us that the process instance is being processed asynchronously, because this is an asynchronous process. If this was a synchronous process, we would see the final result (returned through the <reply> activity) immediately.
Visual Flow
In the next step we can select the visual flow of the execution, instance auditing, or instance debugging. The visual flow of the instance graphically shows the execution of a BPEL process instance. We can monitor the execution of the process and its state (running, completed, canceled, or stale):
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The important thing is that we can click on each activity symbol (such as <receive>, <assign>, etc.) and we will see the corresponding XML input and output. This enables us to verify the processing of each activity. Clicking on the first <receive> activity (client TravelApproval) would open this screen, showing the received message, TravelRequest:
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Instance Auditing
The audit view of the process instance, which we can activate by selecting the Audit tag, shows a complete BPEL process with the received and sent messages. This view is useful for auditing the messages exchanged by the process and the execution of other activities, particularly those manipulating data such as <assign>. The following screenshot shows the audit trail of our travel example process with the XML messages for each activity:
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