SOA composites as well as Service Bus projects typically consist of fair number of artifacts that hang together in ways that are sometimes not so easy to track down. Through import statements, hard coded references and other direct or indirect definitions, dependencies are registered between the many files that make up the application. From BPEL component to WSDL to XSD to other XSD is a not too uncommon path. However, for developers it can be quite a challenge to get a good grasp on these dependency paths. Inspired by – and perhaps more than just inspired – the App XRay feature in OEPE (Eclipse), JDeveloper 12c ships with the Dependency Explorer. This is a tool that can be set upon almost any artifact in SOA composites or Service Bus projects. It will leverage all its built in knowledge about potential dependencies and it will visualize these dependencies.
For example, let’s look at this simple Service Bus project. Right click on the pipeline definition in the navigator window and select the option Explore Dependencies:
The dependencies for this simple case are shown like this:
In the Dependency Explorer itself, we can right click all components listed and drill further down, list the reference details, select the component in the navigator or bring up the editor for the component.
Here is the drilled down overview of dependencies, starting from the WSDL document ProxyService.wsdl and backtracking what are the references to the WSDL document.
In a previous article, we introduced the SOA Suite 12c support for XQuery library modules.
We can open the dependency explorer for an XQuery library
and learn where it is used:
This overview tells us that we will indirectly impact the ProxyService if we do something wrong with the TimeAndDateLibrary.xqy.
An even more impressive overview is produced by exploring the dependencies for a BPEL component, as is shown here:
This results – in this particular example – in:
One final example shows how a Database Adapter was analyzed – both the usage from the SB Business Service and the reference to the WSDL and indirectly the XSD:
Resources
Quite unrelated: domains_sample
