Error Handling in BPEL #2

As I noted about BPEL Error handling here, SOA Suite 10.1.3.3 higher has a Error handling framework in form of fault policies, which is very useful to set up automatic recovery requirements in bpel.

Basically a fault policy says what to do (action) for which fault (condition). And it can be attached to a partnerlink, port type, process or domain. Attaching a fault policy to partnerlink, porttype or process can be done by including it in the bpel.xml. Domain level fault policy attaching can be done in fault-bindings.xml under each domain in $BPELHOME/bpel/domains/"domain-name"/config

Any error happening while invoking a partnerlink, will get captured by this framework and based on the fault policy, action will be taken. The pre-defined actions are retry, rethrow, human-intervention etc.

If we use rethrow as action, the fault will go back to bpel and will be handled by any catch/catch all blocks.

By default, the error handling framework doesn't do anything, as out of box, no policy is configured.

please check this for more information

Update on 6/Apr:
to refresh fault policy changes, server restart is not required, we can use the following link http://host:port/BPELConsole/domain_name/doReloadFaultPolicy.jsp. Also while creating a faultpolicy file, dont forget to put the correct Id name in the faultPolicy tag same as in bpel.xml

Update on 30/Apr
While showcasing faultpolicy to a customer, it became clear that businessfaults couldn’t be handled by fault policies, only technical faults. Which is quite a disadvantage, however its possible to handle business faults by converting the partnerlinks to separate bpel processes and then throwing the businessfault. Also for customizing fault-policy to do requirements like notification or calling another bpel also seems to be a challenge. Can we get the ora-java in the actions available in bpel console? need to check that.