Oracle SOA Suite 11g and 12c: Determining composite dependencies to the level of individual operations

In large companies, often there are many services and dependencies between services. It is important to track service dependencies in order to for example estimate the impact of changes. Design documents or architecture views can be used for this but as everybody knows, there is often a gap between theory and practice (design and implementation).

In this blog post I provide code to determine dependencies between composites to the level of operation calls. In order to achieve this, I'll parse the composite.xml files, JCA files (used by adapters) and also the BPEL and BPMN files in order to determine the operations. The script can be used for SOA Suite 11g and 12c composites.

The above picture shows different parts of which a composite is composed and how they are linked. The script first determines references. The references specify which external services are called. Then by using wires, the relevant components are determined. Based on the component type, specific logic is used to extract the operation. Not shown in this picture is how database dependencies can also be determined by the script by parsing the JCA files specified in the reference. If you're in a hurry, you can go to the 'Executing the script' part directly and skip the explanation.