Posts tagged aggregation

Not too long ago, one of my customers had the following requirement: a file with invoice-entries has to be processed each night; for all invoice entries for the same customer, we would like to start a single BPEL process instance that aggregates the entries and creates a single invoice. To process the entire file, one BPEL process instance needs to be created for every unique customer who has invoice entries in that file. Note however that the Inbound File Adapter knows nothing about the customers or about previously started process instances, it will simply invoke a BPEL process ‘service’ for each line it processes.

The figure illustrates the situation. Note however that the invoice entries need not be sorted, and could well look like this:

BPEL of course offers correlation – the mechanism that allows us to feed messages into already running BPEL process instances. However, before SOA Suite 11g PS5, an inbound operation in a BPEL process – Receive, OnMessage – either initiates an instance (and possibly a correlation set) or it can correlate the inbound message into a running instance. But it cannot do both. So for the customer requirement at hand, correlation as it was is not More >