Debugging in Oracle BPM 11g

Unlike in Oracle BPEL you can't view the input and output values of the flow in a BPMN trace. This remains the same even if you turn on the auditlevel to development. If you want to debug you have to use loghandlers available in BPM activites.

Using Signals in BPM process from different composite

If you have a edl(event defintion file) already defined in a different composite or a  event file in mds . You need to add the import statement in the composite.xml and you will be able to browse the event in the bpmn process. Will cover the details when i have free time

Starting managed servers using nodemanger from admin console

Change property in the nodemanager properties file

When you are planning to start a managed server from admin console (<host>:<port>/console).
Change the following property from false to true in nodemanger properties file.

StartScriptEnabled=true

The node manager properties file can be found at 

<fmw-home>\wlserver_10.3\common\nodemanager\nodemanager.properties

Where fmw-home is the weblogic installation directory or fusion middleware home.

Common Issues encountered

After this if you face port already in use error to start a managed server this is due to the debug property set to the same port . Try adding this lines to setDomain.sh / .bat  depending upon the environment you are using
<fmw-home>\user_projects\domains\soa_domain\bin\setDomainEnv.cmd
Rename the soa_server1 to your corresponding server name by default it is soa_server1

if "%SERVER_NAME%" == "soa_server1" (
   set DEBUG_PORT="8454"
)
at

if "%SERVER_NAME%"=="" (
    set SERVER_NAME=AdminServer
)

oraext:index-within-string throws internal xpath extension error

Using oraext:index-within-string is not pretty simple as it looks so . If you are using

oraext:index-within-string(($inputVariable.payload/client:DocId),'.')

Unlike builtin xpath functions which have internal type conversion this throws an error. Try using 

oraext:index-within-string(string($inputVariable.payload/client:DocId),'.')

Instead which works . Please note the conversion of string here .

This is applicable to oracle bpel assign activity .

how to make a file adapter skip if a directory doesn't exist in oracle bpel

Many a times we come across this requirement to read through all of the sub-directories inside a directory . There are use-cases that  even need to verify empty directories . In such cases adding this property to the composite would help.

User creation in weblogic with multiple properties from ant using wlst

Creating users from the wlst is pretty straight forward and you can go through the oracle documentation for the same. Here is the link to the document page http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13715/config_wls.htm#i1021808.
This is written to automate the task of creating users from ant . The only change that is to be made is to set the fmw.home,user.url,adminusername,adminpassword to your environment.
All the properties can be edited from the build.properties file.
The source has four files

1. Build.xml Contains the call to create users task for creating multiple users in a single shot. users.option is used to specify all or few of the users at a time
2. Build.properties contains the name value pairs that can be customized
3.  createUser.py creates the users using wlst
4. userCreationlibrary.xml contatins invocation to the usercreation.py file with the necessary parameters set

If you need more information please feel free to comment.you can find the code at github. Link to the source is onto the right .

Configuring DB polling adapter with mark reserved value

There are many ways to make the polling of a DB adapter to make it singleton i.e. making the adapter poll a record only once even of there are many nodes on the cluster. This post typically explains how to use mark reserved value with both delete polling strategy and logical delete

This assumes that you have experience in deploying and creating connection factories  in the db adapter . If you need more help on this you can refer to the documentation or search other blogs there are plenty.

These are the steps to be followed for both of the polling strategies

1. Create a table sample in the hr schema 
2. Create a SOA project with composite in JDeveloper
3. Drag and drop a db adapter on to the composite . Fill in all the details with any values you prefer .Create a connection to the hr schema and select it .
4. Select the operation type as poll for new or changed records in the table.
5. Import the table sample and select data as the primary key for the table.
6. The polling strategy is to be selected in this step 
1. Delete Polling strategy
   Select the option delete the rows when read
2. Logical Delete
   Select the option update the field in the sample table(Logical delete)
7. Leave the polling options and advance options to default values and click on finish
8. In the case of Delete polling strategy there is no option for including the values of  MarkReadColumn,MarkReservedValue,MarkUnreadValue.Copy paste in the generated .jca file to make the necessary changes as shown below
9. For Logical delete the ui configuration can be used to fill the property values

Let me take back and explain the use of each property above

• MarkReadColumn
  The column to be used for updating the below given three properties
• MarkReservedValue
  This is the value which is used to pick the records on a specified node. The value can be specified with special variables . Let us look at the above property value and study it.
  In the above sample weblogic.Name is the name of the server node and IP is the ip address fo the node. -2 specifies the last two characters

  R${weblogic.Name-2}-${IP-2}

• MarkUnreadValue
  This property specifies the value of the record which are to be picked . For simplicty you can consider this as where condition
• MarkReadValue
  This property is useful only in the case of logical delete. This property updates the value of MarkReadcolumn with the specified property after sucessful processing for the record