Scheduling BPEL processes

Introduction

A BPEL process needs a trigger to be started. This trigger can be the result of polling of one of the JCA adapters. The trigger can also be external such as for example a service call.

Usually the trigger is a database event which for example can be a change in a table or a direct call using a database table trigger and the UTL_HTTP package.

Using UTL_HTTP from a database trigger to directly call a BPEL process, requires the endpoint of the BPEL process to be known in the database and configuration of the ACL (access control list). This however, can be difficult to implement and maintain if there are many (database and application server) environments.

The customer

Sometimes, it is difficult to obtain a trigger from the database. This is the case if for example changes in a table can not be monitored directly by using a polling databaseadapter. If the customer uses Updateable views (see http://psoug.org/reference/views.html on Updateable views) BPEL can use them, but not all views are updateable. Of course, a separate audittable or file can be used for that, however this requires additional changes out of scope for SCA deployment.

Other options based among others suggested by Lucas Jellema on

http://technology.amis.nl/blog/1372/starting-a-bpel-process-instance-according-to-a-timed-schedule-in-oracle-bpel-pm

were tried. Using the database adapter to poll for a function result from dual to check if processing was required, was not easily implemented since the database adapter wizard requires a mechanism to record processed records. Disclaimer; I spend little time on experimenting with this. Also I didn't like the idea of using a BPEL process to loop and using the BPEL While and Wait activities to provide scheduling, since this process also needs to be started (chicken/egg story) and the processflow would become enormous if for example it would run for several years every few seconds. Such a flow could cause, amongst other things, memory problems if opened in a webbrowser for viewing.

Quartz

A Java programmer suggested using the open source Java scheduler Quartz for scheduling; http://terracotta.org/downloads/quartz-scheduler. Another BPEL developer said he had been experimenting with using Quartz to create BPEL instances and had a working example somewhere. This triggered me to start reading Quartz documentation. Of course, because I'm always optimistic, I first thought about possible issues such as the time required to configure initializing the scheduler at server start/deployment and the time it would require to implement this scheduler.

Then I found the following document; http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/learnmore/soascheduler-186798.pdf and my problems were solved. The Weblogic server contains Quartz libraries which are already configured to be started at server startup saving me configuration time and the example was thorough enough to make implementation easy.

Nice to know; if you want to use the above mentioned example, don't use a 2.x version of Quartz unless you don't mind spending time to migrate the example Quartz 1.x code to 2.x (there are some major changes in the API) and on dealing with class version differences since Weblogic already has 1.x Quartz libraries.

Update

Release 11.1.1.6 of Oracle Fusion Middleware contains an Oracle Enterprise Scheduling Service
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/dev.1111/e24713/intro.htm#sthref10

This might be an even better alternative then using Quartz. I haven't had the time yet though to dive into this.

Even when using relative URL's in the SOAScheduler process, it is challenging to make this work in a clustered environment.