Oracle Bpel Process Manager 10.1.3.4 - New Features

The latest release of SOA Suite and BPA Suite 10.1.3.4 has been released for a while now, so you're probably wondering, what's in it for us ...

Well let's have a look at the new features in Oracle Bpel Process Manager 10.1.3.4:

- Ability to represent real load, to represent the engine behaviour and to know what's actually going on. Go to the administration-tab in your bpel control and drill down into pools to have message details => a dynamic page for threading, updated in real-time

- Statistics are now displayed on process map level and aggregated per process instance => Go to the Analytics-tab in Bpel Control Page
- To miminize XML Coding errors you now have the 'Validate XML'-tab in your BPEL Console

- What about those lost instances, you've instantiated a process but you can't find the instance anymore => Audit trail persistence is moved to a separate thread which will prevent losing all data for a given thread when rollback occurs

- You want to open up a Service Request for an issue you're running into, but you need all diagnostics to be able to log the problem properly => Go to the 'diagnostics'-tab in your BPEL Console to collect support information

- When you've defined your Bpel process and your going through release-management you had to manually update wsdl's, configuration files, etc. to be able to point to the different environments (development, test, qa, production, etc.) => using a deployment plan you can now deploy your bpel process to any environment without the hastle of manually having to change your process parameters => Take a BPEL Suitcase and go to the deployment plan, in this manner you will define a deployment plan for each environment.

Those are big improvements for as well developers, as administrators and especially for troubleshooting.

Uninstalling Oracle Service Registry (OSR) 10.1.3

1. Go to J2EE container and un-deploy the registry application.
2. Stop the J2EE container
3. Login to registry database as sysdba and perform the following,
- Drop the UDDIUSER:
"drop user uddiuser cascade;"
- Delete the UDDINODE tablespace:
"drop tablespace uddinode including contents and datafiles;"
4. Delete the registry installation directory and registry application directory from the deployed application folder on J2EE home
5. In Windows, delete the registry entries/folder with the name "Oracle Service Registry 10.3" and restart the machine
6. Restart the J2EE application container

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.

Hosting Schema, WSDL or any file on OC4J, Apache or Oracle ESB

1. Search for in the file $ORACLE_HOME\Apache\Apache\conf\httpd.conf and add the entry under other Alias entries,

Alias /xsd/ "$XSD_DIR/"

2. Restart Apache Server

3. Start Referencing the XSD as below,

http://hostname:port/xsd/$xsdfilename

Steps to Create WebDav Rules Repository

1. Create new WebDav repository:
   
   • Add following entry in /Apache/oradav/conf/moddav.conf
     <Location /dav_rules>DAV on</Location>
   • Create directory called dav_rules under /Apache/Apache/htdocs directory
     
   • Restart the Apache server and that’s all required for configuring custom repository.
     
2. Now login to ruleauthor web application
   
3. Click on "Repository" icon
   
4. Select "WebDAV" from "Repository Type" drop down menu
   
5. Provide URL as http://soa_host:soa_port/dav_rules and click connect
   
6. You should be seeing a confirmation box about the successful connection. If not please try browsing that URL and see if you are able to access it or not. Also if you have setup security on that, please provide username and password to connect.
   
7. Not you can create new WebDAV connection in JDeveloper by going to "connection tab" and right click on "WebDAV Server" icon and select "New WebDAV connection"
   
8. Provide URL you used in step 8 here and username and password if required.
   
9. Click on "Test Connection" button to see if it’s successful.

How to change your Eclipse JVM

As an example, I will update the Eclipse JVM to use JRockit:

edit %ECLIPSE_HOME%/eclipse.ini

Add the following:
-vm %BEA_HOME%\jrockit90_150_04\jre\bin\javaw.exe

Make sure you replace the %BEA_HOME% with an actual valid path such as "C:\BEA\" then restart.

Change your default JVM for workspace to the new JVM:

Once you bring up Eclipse goto – Windows -> Preferences -> Java -> Installed JRE and then on the UI that pops up choose - and add a new JRE and point to the following directory below "%BEA_HOME%\jrockit90_150_04\jre".

After adding the JRE, make it the default JRE for all projects, exit and restart and you're done.

Also make sure that the %PATH% has "C:\YOURBEAHOME\jrockit90_150_04\jre\bin;" reference before it refrences any other JDK.

And your JAVA_HOME is pointing to "C:\YOURBEAHOME\jrockit90_150_04\jre"

Scheduling Polling Frequency for Adapters in Oracle ESB

File Adapter will collect the files from specified folder at the polling frequency time parameter, such as every 1 second or 1 min. What about specified time, every 6pm or every morning? How?? The solution is to use the Quartz in conbination with Oracle ESB Client APIs.

Using the client APIs you can the status to enabled/disabled at the specified time.

Oracle ESB API can also be invoked via HTTP protocol. You can try this http://server:port/esbConfiguration/executeCommand?action=ExploreServices.

This URL will return an XML metadata where you can explore the services in ESB,
such as guid and status.

And this is how we create quartz to work with OC4J
http://radio.weblogs.com/0135826/2004/04/02.html

This is the example of how we communicate with Oracle ESB API Client

JAVA CODE

ConsoleClient client = ConsoleClientFactory.getConsoleClient(HOST, PORT, USER_NAME,PASSWORD);
client.perform(”UpdateServiceStatus”, requestProps);