SOA for the Business Developer: Concepts, BPEL, and SCA (Business Developers series)

The reply activity responds to a message received by one of the following kinds of inbound message activities (IMAs): a receive activity, an onMessage event (within the pick activity), or an onEvent handler.

<reply name="confirmQuote" partnerLink="agent" operation="requestQuote" variable="quoteResponse"/>

The partner link, port type, and operation used in the reply activity are the same as the partner link, port type, and operation used in the IMA.

Consider the following port type.

<wsdl:portType name="agentPT"> <wsdl:operation name="requestQuote"> <wsdl:input message="requestMessage" /> <wsdl:output message="responseMessage" /> </wsdl:operation> </wsdl:portType>

When the BPEL process is using a combination of IMA and reply activity:

• the message sent by the partner service is described by the input message

• the message returned by the BPEL process is described by the output message

The port type implies synchronous processing, which means that the requester suspends processing while waiting for a response. The requester may treat the invocation as synchronous or asynchronous, however, depending on the runtime software that handles the interaction between the two services.

Among the attributes of the reply activity:

• partnerLink identifies the partner link used to connect to the service.

• portType identifies the port type but is optional because the port type is implied by the partner link and by the role identifier myRole in that partner link.

• operation identifies the service operation.

• variable identifies a variable that contains the business data being sent to the service. Specify this variable only if you don't specify the toParts element.

• faultName identifies a WSDL fault name, as used when sending a fault message to the partner service.

• messageExchange references a message exchange.

Among the elements in the reply activity:

• correlations references one or more correlation sets.

• toParts identifies a set of message parts and related variables for data sent to the partner service. Specify this element only if you don't specify the variable attribute.