Debugging Bpel processes

You could debug bpel processes using different kinds of approaches, such as looking into audit trails, sniffing the soap envelopes with the request- and response message, using junit, using the bpel console, …

In this post I’ll mention the 2 approaches I use the most, namely the bpel console itself and Junit.

Visual Debugging Using BPEL Console

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g BPEL Control reduces the cost and complexity of deploying and managing your business processes. Visually monitor the execution of each BPEL process, drill down into the audit trail and view the details of each conversation, or debug a running flow against its BPEL implementation.

If you’ve deployed a bpel process, you can test the execution in the BPEL Console: http://server:port/ BPELConsole.

In the screen above you can see the deployed bpel processes on the lef-hand side of the screen. To instantiate such a process and create a test instance you can click on the process name and the below screen will be shown:

In this screen you can test the process by defining your own payload, data to be processed by the BPEL process. To define the payload you can use an html-form, the default screen or you can paste the soap-envelop, an xml-based message into the xml-source textarea. To actually test the instance you just need to click on the ‘Send XML-Message’-button. You can also perform stress tests on the bpel processes to verify if performance problems may occure on peak moments.

When you’ve clicked on the button, the process is instantiated and the following screen is shown:

In the tabbed windows you can have a detailed look at the instantiated process, depending on your requirements:

Visual flow:

The activities that failed, threw an exception, are shown with a red background. Each activity in the visual flow holds all needed information for that specific activity. When you double click an activity, the needed data will be shown in an xml-format, because xml is the standard messaging-format for web services.

Audit instance:

Debug instance:

Debug BPEL Processes via JUnit

As soon as a BPEL process is deployed, the BPEL process lives on as being a web service. The webservice can be accessed by its endpoint, or wsdl location.

On the wsdl-tab of your BPEL Process, in the Bpel Console, you can look-up the end-point of the deployed bpel process = web service.

In Jdeveloper you can define a Web Service Proxy and integrate a Junit-test case for this web service proxy:

package test.proxy;

import javax.xml.rpc.ServiceFactory;

public
class BPELTest_ServiceTest extends junit.framework.TestCase{
private
BPELTest_Service myBPELTest_Service;

public
BPELTest_ServiceTest(java.lang.String name){
super(name);
}

protected void setUp() throws Exception {
ServiceFactory factory =
ServiceFactory.newInstance();
myBPELTest_Service =
(test.proxy.BPELTest_Service)factory.loadService(test.proxy.BPELTest_Service.class);
}

protected void tearDown(){
myBPELTest_Service = null;
}

public void testBPELTestPortprocess() throws java.lang.Exception {
test.proxy.BPELTest_PortType port = myBPELTest_Service.getBPELTestPort();
test.proxy.BPELTestProcessRequest payload = null;
BPELTestProcessResponse response = port.process(payload);
assertEquals(“389”, response.toString());
}
}