B Workflow and Notification Reference

B.1 Task Manager Service WSDL Operations

The task manager service exposes operations that can be invoked from the BPEL business process to orchestrate the workflow. The task manager service also provides state management and persistency for the tasks. The task manager service exposes the following operations. All the operations are exposed on the WSDL port type TaskManager.

• initiateTask—initiates a task by persisting the task in the database

• reinitiateTask—reinitiates a task to continue an existing task

• updateTask—updates the task

• renewTask—renews the task with a specified duration

• notifyTaskExpiration—notifies the task manager service that the task is expired. This operation is invoked from the task action handler business process, which manages the expiration of the task.

• initiateSubTask—initiates a subtask in a parallel workflow pattern

• completeTask—completes the task with a specified conclusion

• sendTaskReminder—notifies the task manager service to send a reminder for the task. This operation is invoked from the task action handler business process, which manages task reminders.

• releaseTask—releases a previously acquired task

• errorTask—notifies the task manager service that the task is in an errored state and that the task should be marked as errored

The WSDL for TaskManagerService is available at

 http://hostname:port/orabpel/xmllib/workflow/TaskManagerService.wsdl

The XSD used by TaskManagerService is available at

http://hostname:port/orabpel/xmllib/workflow/WorkflowTask.xsd

B.2 Task Routing Service WSDL Operations

The task routing service exposes operations that can be invoked from the BPEL business process to perform task routing operations. The task manager service exposes the following operations. All the operations are exposed on the WSDL port type TaskRoutingService.

• routeTask—routes the task to a specified participant

• routeTaskToNextApprover—routes the task to the next approver as determined by evaluating the approver function

• escalateTask—escalates the task to the manager

• escalateTaskOnExpiration—escalates the task when the task is expired. The operation also renews the task by a specified duration.

The WSDL for TaskRoutingService is available at

http://hostname:port/orabpel/default/TaskActionHandler/TaskRoutingService.wsdl

The XSD for the service is available at

http://hostname:port/orabpel/xmllib/workflow/TaskRoutingService.xsd

B.3 Notification WSDL Operations

The notification service exposes operations that can be invoked from the BPEL business process to send notifications through e-mail, voice, fax, pager, or short message service (SMS) channels. The notification service exposes the following operations on the WSDL port type NotificationService.

• sendVoiceNotification—sends an instance messenger notification

• sendSMSNotification—sends an instance messenger notification

• sendEmailNotification—sends an e-mail notification

• sendNotificationToUser—sends a notification to a user. The notification channel used is determined by the orclWorkflowNotificationPref attribute in Oracle Internet Directory (OID) or JAZN-XML. If no preference is specified, then e-mail is used. The input message to this operation contains two parts—the group ID and the generic notification payload. The generic payload contains a common payload that applies to all the channels and a payload for each of the channels. The message that is actually sent is evaluated from the generic payload.

• sendNotificationToGroup—sends a notification to a group using the e-mail channel. If the group does not have an e-mail address associated with it, then the notification is sent to each member of the group using their preferred notification channel. The input message to this operation contains two parts—the group ID and the generic notification payload. The generic payload contains a common payload that applies to all the channels and a payload for each of the channels. The message that is actually sent is evaluated from the generic payload.

B.4 Identify Service Operations

The identity service exposes the following operations that can be invoked from the BPEL business process. All the operations are exposed on the WSDL port type IdentityService.

• getManager—gets the manager of a user, which can also be obtained using the ora:getManager() XPath extension function.

• getManagementChain—gets the management chain based on the input message

The WSDL for the IdentityService is available at

http://hostname:port/orabpel/xmllib/workflow/LocalIdentityService.wsdl

The XSD for the service is available at

http://hostname:port/orabpel/xmllib/workflow/LocalIdentityService.xsd

B.5 Task Action Handler Business Process

The task action handler business process receives updates from Oracle BPEL Worklist Application through the task manager service or the task routing service. The main task of the process is to keep the task synchronized in the BPEL process with its database state. Based on the state of the task, the process determines if the parent BPEL process should be called back with the task. An instance of the task action handler process is created for each participant for a given task. Participants who participate in the task when the current participant performs operations like reassign, escalate, and so on reuse the same process.

In addition, the task action handler process manages the following timer events:

• Task expiration

• Reminder durations for the task

• Task release durations when the task is acquired

B.6 Summary

This appendix describes workflow and notification service WSDL operations.