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OIC Process Correlation: Take Good Care of Your Properties by Jan Kettenis

Blog: PaaS Community

The other day we had an issue with correlating process instances which turned out to be caused by some “mistake” we made. Took quite some time to figure it out so I thought I share it with you, hoping it can safe you some time.

First I will explain what correlation is about (you may want to check out a much more elaborate blog article on how to use it in OIC-Process by Martien van den Akker, or another one from Anthony Reynolds explaining the concept in the context of BPEL). Correlation is in OIC-Process not really different from what it is in Oracle BPM Suite so if you already know that or when you have done it before in OIC you can skip the next paragraph.

When one process instance is calling another one and of the latter there may be multiple instances, you need a way to make sure the second process calls back the right instance of the first process. That is done by making that the instance to call can uniquely be identified, or “correlated” as it is called. In many cases correlation is out-of-the-box, like for synchronous calls or asynchrounous calls using WS-Addressing. When there is no out-of-the-box correlation, you need to configure it explicitly using what is called “message-based correlation”. That means that instances are correlated using a key (value or combination of values) which is (part of) the message that is send from one instance to the other. In OIC that key is called (not surprisingly) the “correlation key” (same as “correlation set” in BPEL). The correlation key has one or more “properties” for which the (combination of) values must be unique in such a way that at any time there cannot be two or more instance flows of the calling process using the same correlation key value(s). Read the complete article here.

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