Error Handling in BPEL

Error handling is always a key core service on BPEL and there are always confusions around how to handle it,

There are various aspects to error handling in BPEL/ESB
1. esb errors
2. bpel partner link errors
3. bpel non-partnerlink errors

The simple answer is catch and catch-all

catch is for system defined faults like bindingfault, remotefault, selectionfailure etc. There are 12 of them that we can see in the Fault explorer. Once we catch them, we create a variable of type RuntimeFaultMessage from RuntimeFault.wsdl (under SOA_HOME\bpel\system\xmllib)


catchall is for everything else, and we can get the error String by ora:getFaultAsString()

The best practice to handle these faults in catch/catch-all blocks is to do the following steps

1. create a custom fault message, based on all the values we need to capture for example processid, instanceid etc.

2. send the fault message to a custom error handler, which basically can log the error, send it to worklist or send an email

3. send a reply back to client about the error message, this would need the wsdl to have provisions for sending fault data as part of response or fault

4. Terminate

Alternatives we can also use ThrowFault in step#3 if the wsdl has provisions for faults. However I found that while using throwFault step#2 gets rolled back, so adding a checkpoint() resolves it.

SOA Suite10.1.3.3 onwards also has the built in fault policy to handle errors. Basically whenever partnerlink errors happen, bpel checks with fault policy to decide what to do. In the fault policy we can configure different actiontypes like retry, rethrowfault etc.

I will cover fault policies and error handling frameworks in more detail in another post.