Use of correlation sets in SOA Suite by Martien van den Akker

Years ago, I had plans to write a book about BPEL or at least a series of articles to be bundled as a BPEL Course. I stranded with only one Hello World article. This year, I came up with the idea of doing something around Correlation Sets. Preparing a series of articles and a talk. And therefor, let’s start with an article on Correlation Sets in BPEL. Maybe later on I could pick up those earlier plans again.

You may have read "BPEL", and tend to skip this article. But wait, if you use BPM Suite: the Oracle BPM Process Engine is the exact same thing as the BPEL Process engine! And if you use the Processes module of Oracle Integration Cloud: it can use Correlation Sets too. Surprise: again it uses the exact same Process Engine as Oracle SOA Suite BPEL and Oracle BPM Suite.

Why Correlation Sets?

Now, why Correlation Sets and what are those? You may be familiar with OSB or maybe Mulesoft, or other integration tools. OSB is a stateless engine. What comes in is executed at once until it is done. So, services in OSB are inherently synchronous and short-lived. You may argue that you can do Asynch Services in OSB. But those are in fact "synchronous" one-way services. Fire & Forget, as you will. They are executed right away (hence the quoted synchronous) , until it is done. But the calling application does not expect a result (and thus asynchronous in the sense that the caller won’t wait).

You could, and I have done it actually, create asynchronous request response services in OSB. Asynchronous Request Response services are actually two complementary one way fire & forget services. For such a WSDL both services are defined in different port types: one for the actual service consumer, and one callback service for the service provider. Using WS-Addressing header elements the calling service will provide a ReplyTo callback-endpoint and a MessageId to be provided by the responding service as an RelatesTo MessageId. Read the complete article here.

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