SOA Suite 12c: Neat little feature in Service Bus Pipelines: Disable/Enable Activity to ease development

Sometimes it is just a small feature that can make life easier. SOA Suite 12c is full of large, sweeping new components and grant improvements. And it also has a ton of smaller things. One such smaller new thing is the ability in Pipelines in Service Bus projects to disable an activity. Sounds perhaps like something you would typically not want to do – add an activity then disable it. However, activities may be created initially to design the overall flow of the pipeline – without necessarily configuring each activity in detail. Or during test runs of the pipeline, you may want to skip a number of activities that take time, require business services to be invoked and are simply not relevant for the test run.

To disable an activity in a pipeline, simply right click the activity and select Disable from the context menu:

A disabled activity is visualized like this:

The activity can be enabled in much the same way – right mouse click and enable.

Particularly useful can be the disablement of a currently problematic activity, such as the nXSD Translate in the next figure:

By disabling the activity, the pipeline is runnable again, despite the current configuration issue with the [disabled] activity: