From the Cluster Topology page of Enterprise Manager Application Server Control, you get a hierarchical view of your OC4J Instances and their applications. You can click into each to undeploy, but sometimes you want to undeploy multiple applications (like multiple human tasks from your undeployed BPEL processes — since the BPEL Console undeploy does not actually undeploy the human tasks). Here are a list of steps that would allow you to undeploy multiple applications from oracle application server:

1.  Login to oracle “Application Server Control”
2.  Scroll to Groups tab
3.  Select the proper “OC4J Instance”. The instance that contains you deployments.
4.  Click on the “Applications” tab

This window allows you to start, stop, undeploy or redeploy mutliple applications.

Oracle BPA does a great job importing into BPEL, but here are a few items that need to be manually configured:

• Process Payloads need to be copied, Assigns to set up parameters
• Import from BPA to JDeveloper tool, the build.xml and build properties are often missing and need to be copied from other projects
• Human Tasks need to have forms assigned
• Embedded Java tasks cannot be round-tripped back into BPA, so they shouldn’t be used

Oracle has made some great strides with their BPM and SOA offerings. For M&S, combining process and technology has become even more exciting with Oracle’s tools. For the first time, Oracle has made it possible for our consultants to more easily bring together best of breed solutions (IDS Scheer’s ARIS and Oracle SOA) and leading industry standards (BPMN, BPEL, and BPEL4People) to our implementations, which typically involve some level of process management/improvement and technology automation (workflow and reporting).

Following is a quick image of how each person in an organization fits into our approach when combining process with technology using Oracle technologies:

This is a very, very common complaint I hear from developers, testers, and production support.

I find there are a couple reasons that this can happen:

1. The flow has faulted sometime after the wait activity, but never dehydrated again, so it appears to be “stuck” on the wait activity. Put in some more waits to force dehydration soon after your “problematic” wait to ensure the wait really isn’t your issue.

2. In 10.1.3, the default wait in JDev is set to 1 day; please, be sure to set your wait times properly.

3. The flow really is just waiting too long. Oracle advertises the wait time as a “minimum”. You may want to increase the number of threads you have running for your scheduler.

• Stop your application server
• Take a backup copy of the following file:
  \bpel\domains\[domain-name]\config\resources-quartz.properties
• Change the resources-quartz.properties file:
  com.oracle.bpel.expirationAgent.threadCount is defaulted to 10. You can increase this to 50 or 100, or more depending on your load.
• Restart the application server

Are you running out of disk space because your domain.log is growing too fast?

1. Open BPEL_HOME/domains//config/log4j-config.xml
2. Change the appender class from com.collaxa.cube.util.CXRollingFileAppender to org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
3. Add a new parameter:

   <param value="50MB" name="MaxFileSize" />
   

Here is an example of what the file should look like in the end:

<log4j:configuration xmlns:log4j="http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/">
<appender class="org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender" name="A1">
<param value="true" name="ImmediateFlush" />
<param value="false" name="Append" />
<param value="D:/soa/product/10.1.3.1/as_1/bpel/domains/default/logs/domain.log" name="File" />
<param value="50MB" name="MaxFileSize" />
<param value="10" name="MaxBackupIndex" />

Notes:

• MaxFileSize will dictate max size for each log file while MaxBackupIndex will dictate the total number of log files that will accumulate (the above settings will yield a maximum of 550MB
• Any new domain will get these values be default, so change their respective log4j-config.xml file
• These changes require a BPEL restart

Marc Kelderman wrote a helpful article on this topic:

http://orasoa.blogspot.com/2007/03/delete-bpel-instances.html

And one of the users there also notes:

Note there is a patch to 10.1.3.3 to purge old data (6372741). Its a fairly dumb one that deletes everything older than a given date. Trying to do something more elaborate we have noticed that if you use the script in this article as a basis then rows in xml_document table are not removed.

We will add more to this starting point soon.

If you have used the email notification activity in Oracle BPEL (up through the latest version at the time of this writing, 10.1.3.3.1), you might have found that you always get an attachment for your email body, even if you don’t want one.  There is a solution:

Once in the scope of the email notification activity, look for a copy block like the following.  It typically contains ‘NotificationAttachment1.html’:

<copy>
<from expression=”string(’NotificationAttachment1.html’)”/>
<to variable=”varNotificationReq” part=”EmailPayload”

query=”/EmailPayload/ns1:Content/ns1:ContentBody/ns1:MultiPart/ns1:BodyPart[1]/ns1:BodyPartName”/>
;
</copy>

You should remove this completely and voila - you’re email with show up in the body of the email. 

Note: you should still pick multipart message with 1 attachment (just unintuitive UI in JDeveloper for this).  So, if you pick 2 attachments, you will actually get 1 attachment.

If you have experienced issues when moving from Salesforce.com API version 10.0 to 11.1, you might want to take a look at your content headers and security setup.  Following is the error you might receive in Oracle BPEL:

<remoteFault xmlns="http://schemas.oracle.com/bpel/extension”>

<part name="summary">

<summary>

exception on JaxRpc invoke: HTTP transport error:

javax.xml.soap.SOAPException:

java.security.PrivilegedActionException:

oracle.j2ee.ws.saaj.ContentTypeException:

Not a valid SOAP Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

</summary>

</part>

</remoteFault>

Oracle’s BPEL4People spec is starting to make some waves.  After having years of success with their proprietary Oracle Workflow product (which drove Oracle Applications processes and workflow), they are now injecting what they know works into the BPEL world.  We’ll keep you posted on BPEL4People updates as they happen.

We have had scenarios where our wait blocks in our BPEL flows all start getting stuck.  Strange as it is, we have been able to resolve this by rebooting the SOA Suite.

Has anyone else had this happen to them?  Do you perhaps have other solutions?

Anyone running BPEL 10.1.3.1 should really consider ugrading to 10.1.3.3. There are many bug fixes and the upgrade itself is fairly easy to implement and test. We upgraded one of our clients and noticed less issues during development and maintenance. More info is to come here.

We had an issue where BAM stopped working after installing SOA Suite on a Windows 2003 Server (BAM only runs on Windows at the time of this writing). After trying to uninstall/reinstall many times ourselves, Oracle Support suggested that this was not a compatible configuration. We have done it before (in play environments), but this clearly can cause some issues that are not easy to resolve. So, in this case, we ended up splitting the installation to different machines and have been sleeping much better at night.

I wanted to note that our team received an error when managers logged into the Worklist Application on one of our implementations. There is very little information available for this online, but we were able to work with Oracle Support to get a patch. So, if you experience an error like the following, reach out to Oracle Support or even us. We’ll be happy to help.

Internal Error in Verification Service for user ADAM. getRoleBasedGroupActions.

If you need more information, please check with your administrator with the following exception-identifier:
“2007/09/28_10:43:42:782_ADAM”

Note: We had this error using BPEL 10.1.3.1, but we understand this could still exist in version 10.1.3.3. We were running on Red Hat Linux.

I have been involved in the Fusion Middleware 11g beta program as well as participating in other ways as a member of the Advisory Board for Oracle Portal and Oracle SOA Suite. Although I can’t say much, I can tell you that there is some exciting new features coming for developers, administrators, and end-users.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g will prove to be a very large release that is both deep and broad. As more information becomes public (or I am authorized to share more), I will do so on this blog.

Until then, just get ready.