BPM 12c Advanced Error Handling and Recovery – Part 1 by Antonis Antoniou

Introduction

The ability to handle exceptions and recover from errors is fundamental to implementing reliable and robust business processes and enterprise systems.

There might be cases, though, when an unexpected problem occurs during the runtime lifecycle of a process that will cause your process to fail. This could be the result of a connectivity loss, a failure in a database connection, a selection failure, or a failure during an invoke activity. These types of errors, referred to as systems errors, arise directly from the underlying software or hardware infrastructure where the BPMN Service Engine is running.

There might be cases when business faults occur. These are application-specific faults that are generated when there is a problem with the information being processed (e.g., a stock control and inventory service throwing an error when a stock item is not found). Business faults are a more “controlled” fault type since you are aware of its plausible appearance; it can occur only if your application executes a THROW activity or your invoke activity receives a fault message response.

However, despite their essentialness, error handling and recovery are often overlooked in Business Process Management (BPM) projects. Analysts tend to model exception handling (mostly system or rare business faults) in the BPMN, making process design very complex, and very difficult to read and follow—resulting in skyrocketing maintenance efforts.

The new release of Oracle BPM Suite 12c introduced some really nice new error handling and recovery features. And even though I am tempted to just put on my developer’s hat, I cannot ignore the importance of the fundamental improvements Oracle has made in error recovery, from an operations and management perspective.

This two-part article will compare the differences in fault handling options between 11g and 12c and will explore the new error handling and recovery features introduced in Oracle BPM 12c from both a developer’s angle (part 1) and an administrator’s perspective (part 2).

Main

Force Commit After Execution

One of the new developer-oriented error handling and recovery features in Oracle BPM 12c is the “Force commit after execution” option (see Figure 1, below). This option configures activities, events and gateways to explicitly force BPM runtime to add a checkpoint in the dehydration store, committing the state of the BPM instance after their execution.

This important new feature lets developers explicitly force dehydration during process execution to avoid re-executing non-idempotent activities in case an error forces the transaction to be rolled back.

Let’s take, for example, the loan initiation process. A customer requests a loan and the system exports the loan application into an xml file before persisting the loan application data into an operational database (see Figure 2). Read the complete article here.

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