ActiveBPEL® Designer User’s Guide

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Tutorial Part 2: Planning and Designing a Process

Tutorial Part 1: Starting a New Process covered creating a new project and a new BPEL file.

By completing Part 2 of the tutorial, you will be able to:

• Understand the design of the loan approval process
• Understand top-down vs. bottom-up design
• Use layout features of the Process Editor to optimize process display
• Review BPEL validation messages

At the end of this tutorial part, you will understand the loan approval process we will build.

Note: A completed file called loanapproval_tutorial_complete.bpel is located in the ActiveBPEL_Samples project in the ActiveBPEL Designer installation folder. The complete set of design and deployment files are available for you to simulate and remotely debug the process.

What is the Loan Approval Process?

The loan approval process starts by receiving a customer request for a loan amount. If the request is for less than $10,000, the assessor’s Web service is invoked to assess whether the customer is a low or high risk. If the customer is low risk, the request is approved. Otherwise, the request is sent to the approver for review. If the amount is for $10,000 or more, the request is always sent to the approver for review. The customer can receive acceptance from the assessor or an accept/reject reply from the approver.

A top-down design would begin by adding activities to the Process editor, without adding any valid attributes to them. A top-down design would look similar to this:

This part of the tutorial familiarizes you with the Process Editor, demonstrating features you can use to create a top-down design. We will not create a complete top-down design.

Step 1: Create a Receive activity

A BPEL process begins by receiving an input message. This means a top-down design would start with either a Receive or a Pick activity, since they are structured to receive data from a business partner’s Web service.

1. Ensure the tutorial.bpel file that you created in Part 1 is open in the Process Editor.
2. From the Activity palette, drag a Receive icon to the canvas.

The activity is labeled with Receive.

3. Ensure that the Receive is selected. A selection box encloses it. When it is selected, the Properties view displays Receive attributes.
4. To make the activity name more meaningful, do one of the following:
• Click on the activity label Receive and type in ReceiveOrder. Do not use spaces in the name.

or

• In Properties view, type in the Activity Name field, ReceiveOrder.

The following example shows what your activity should look like.

Step 2: Working with Layout Features in the Process Editor

You can use several features in the Process Editor to optimize the display of your process. We will complete a short exercise to demonstrate the layout features.

1. From the Activity palette, drag an Empty activity to the canvas.
2. Try the following features by selecting them from the toolbar:



• Use Auto Layout to layout activities in a grid
• Select two or more activities and Align them
• Magnify the display area with Zoom
• For a complex process, display the Thumbnail view to select one area of your design to view. By default the Thumbnail view is closed. Open it from the Window>Show View command.
3. Delete the Empty activity.

Step 3: Save the File and Review BPEL Validation Messages

Take a moment to save your file. You will notice a change to your Receive activity icon. Also, some errors have been added to the Problems view, as shown.

These “errors” are added to the Problems view by default when you save your file. They are messages pertaining to the validation of BPEL code generated for your process. You can see the BPEL XML code in the Source view of the Process Editor.

The errors listed in Problems view will automatically disappear as we complete a valid BPEL process in the tutorial.

Continue to Tutorial Part 3: Adding Web References.

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 Active Endpoints, Inc.