Repairing BPEL processes and activities using Business Process Choreographer Explorer
If a BPEL process runs into problems, you can analyze the process and then repair the activities.
About this task
Business Process Choreographer Explorer provides various views for the process administrator to monitor the processes that are currently running.
The failure behavior of your process is controlled by the Continue On Error setting of the process template. If Continue On Error is set to no, any unexpected failure causes the affected activity to go to the stopped state.
If Continue On Error is set to yes (or if it is not set because your process was created with a WebSphere® Integration Developer version earlier than 6.1.2) and an unexpected failure occurs, the default fault handler is invoked and ultimately causes the process to end in a failed state. The latter happens because with an unexpected failure there is no appropriate fault handler in the directly surrounding scope. When there is no explicit fault handler defined for the current fault and the default fault handler is invoked, it terminates the current scope and propagates the fault to the surrounding scope. Ultimately, this will cause the process to end in the failed state.
For invoke, Java snippet, human task, and custom activities you can model a dedicated Continue On Error setting and override the process setting. However, if you leave the default value the same as for the process, you can repair failure situations for these activity types. The setting at the activity level controls only the behavior of faults that are generated by the implementation of the activity. Faults that occur during the evaluation of the join condition, or during the evaluation of the transition condition of outgoing links are still controlled by the setting at the process level. Therefore, for example, an invoke activity can go to the stopped state (if, for example, the evaluation of its join condition failed) even if the Continue On Error setting at the activity level is set to yes.
If your activity stops, the process remains in the running state. You then have several options in Business Process Choreographer Explorer to repair the process and continue navigation.
Procedure
- To view process instances with activities in the stopped state, define your own process instance search. Or, click Stopped Activities under Activity Instances in the navigation pane, and then click the relevant process instance of the failed activity.
- To view process instances with activities in the stopped state, click Critical Processes under Process Instances in the navigation pane.
- To monitor the progress of a specific process instance, click View Process State in any view that displays a list of process instances.
What to do next
You can now take action to repair the pending activities.
- Analyzing the cause of a failed BPEL process
Check information about an exception which caused a BPEL process to fail. If the process is in the failed state, you cannot repair the instance itself but you might be able to fix the cause of the problem to prevent the failure of future instances. - Modifying the variables of a stopped activity
Check the variables of an activity, and repair the process variables if they caused the activity to stop. - Restarting activities
You can restart an activity using new input data, for example, if you repaired the variables of an activity. - Forcing the completion of activities
If you are aware that an activity is not going to complete in a timely manner, for example, because the invoked service is no longer available, you can force the completion of the activity so that the process flow can continue. You might also want to force the completion of an activity if you cannot repair the cause of the failure. For example, if the evaluation of a wait expression in a wait activity repeatedly causes the activity to stop, you might want to force the activity to complete. - Rescheduling activities
You can reschedule activities using new date and time data in Business Process Choreographer Explorer. - Repairing stopped activities
You can use Business Process Choreographer Explorer to manually intervene in the navigation of a BPEL process. You can repair activities that stopped because problems occurred, for example, during an expression evaluation. - Repairing stopped activities using the process state view
Using the process state view in Business Process Choreographer Explorer, you can manually repair activities that stopped. - Recovery from infrastructure failures
A long-running BPEL process spans multiple transactions. If a transaction fails because of an infrastructure failure, Business Flow Manager provides a facility for automatically recovering from these failures. - Repairing correlation sets
You can view and modify the correlation sets for an activity using Business Process Choreographer Explorer. Additionally, you can repair activity correlation sets that are incorrect due to runtime faults or repair actions, or due to jump operations in the BPEL process. - Jumping activities
You can jump from one activity to another activity in the BPEL process instance. You can select to complete the source activity before you jump to a target activity. - Skipping activities in BPEL processes
You can skip an activity so that it is not included in the processing of the BPEL process instance. - Administering compensation for microflows using Business Process Choreographer Explorer
When a microflow runs, it can encounter problems. For these situations, compensation might have been defined for the BPEL process in the process model. Compensation allows you to undo previous completed steps, for example, to reset data and states so that you can recover from these problems. Undo actions are only necessary for activities that perform actions which do not participate in the transaction of the microflow.