Why BPEL process instances may appear on the Manual Recovery List

Messages appearing on the Recovery Console happen for a number of reasons, namely;

BPEL has a Delivery Service that intercepts the incoming messages. Once it intercepts an incoming message, the delivery service does two things: 1) Put a very short JMS message to the in-memory queue . The small JMS message will trigger work further downstream of the process. 2) Save the BPEL message to tables at the dehydration store.

In the same thread the BPEL engine instantiate or continue the BPEL instance. By the time the engine finishes processing this message (i.e. hits the end of the process, or hits the first dehydration point) the engine will update the message tables to mark the message as "HANDLED".

The Recovery page shows those invoke or callback messages that are NOT in the HANDLED state. If you click fast enough, you will see messages come and go on the Recovery page. So seeing messages at the Recovery page does not necessarily mean there are problems, unless ...

Unless they stay there permanently. They stay there permanently because there are no more JMS messages to trigger the WorkerBean to process those un-handled BPEL messages in invoke_message or dlv_message tables. Derived from this, these are the scenarios that could cause the BPEL messages stay at UNRESOLVED states:

* The server shuts down or crash before it finish processing the BPEL message. When the server re-started again, the in-memory JMS message associated with the invoke or call back message is already is already gone.
* The engine could not finish processing the message before reaching the time-out as dictated by the transaction-time out specified in the server.xml. In such case it rolls back the message to the message table. But the JMS message associated with the invoke messages are already consumed.

In these cases, no more events (i.e. JMS messages) to trigger the engine to process the BPEL messages in invoke_message or dlv_message tables. Therefore a manual recovery is performed.