4.7. BPEL Designer Concepts

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Table 4.7. BPEL Designer Concepts
Name	Description
Assign error	Hovering your mouse over this icon will display an error message.
Basic activities	Basic activities are represented on the drawing canvas as rounded rectangles containing an icon and the user-defined name of the activity. The Actions section of the Palette contains all of the basic activities. For example: Assign, Invoke and Receive.
Start and End	Every process has Start and End activities that act as placeholders for visualizing the beginning and end of the process flow.
Assign activity	The Assign activity allows you to manipulate variables and message contents that are defined in the process.
Invoke	The Invoke activity is used to send a message to an external service (one-way invocation) and, optionally, wait for a response (request and response). An Invoke can also define a compensation handler and a fault handler to handle exception conditions.
Receive	The Receive activity will wait for a specific message type from a service client.
Reply	The Reply activity is used to respond to clients with a specific message type or a fault message.
Validate	The Validate activity is used to validate the values of variables against their XML Schema and WSDL data definitions. This includes the variable’s data type as well as structure. If validation fails, the BPEL standard fault invalidVariables is thrown. Validation is typically performed just before sending messages to a partner or client, or after receiving a message to ensure the message contains all required data.
Wait	The Wait activity will delay process execution for a certain amount of time, or until a given date and time. This is typically used to invoke an operation at a certain time. For example to update process state hourly or daily, or to collect some information from another service at a certain time.

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