Insert/Extract SOAP Headers in BPEL

It has been very common topic to insert and extract SOAP headers with BPEL. Lately, I was working with extracting WSSE headers in BPEL, I had to apply some tricks that made me write this BLOG entry.

Inserting Headers in BPEL Outbound:

I will try to enter three different types of headers:

1) Complex XSD element

2) Simple XSD element

3) WSSE headers - which comes out-of-box with BPEL

- First of all I defined XSD element which I want to insert in SOAP headers, e.g.

Here I have created ComplexCredentialElement as XSD Complex element and and Username and Password with XSD simple type. Here namespace is extremely important, I will insert all elements in SOAP header with "http://xmlns.oracle.com/InsertHeaderVariables" namespace. A target process will need to know namespace while extracting Headers, that's why namespace is very important in this case.

Now, in BPEL process I created variable and assigned those variable with some dummy values. You can see my BPEL process as well as source code in following figure:

Here I created variable of the header elements, and assigned dummy values to them. Now when I invoke the partnerlink, I need to specify those variable as bpelx:inputHeaderVariable, and BPEL PM will take care of inserting them when creating SOAP envelope. I believe if you have to insert some SOAP headers for enterprise wide, you can use OWSM client agent to do so, and if you haven't bought OWSM product then writing custom BPEL partnerlink interceptor would be an awesome choice rather than putting header in each partner link. Stay tuned for my blog on intercepting/hacking BPEL partnerlink!

The last one is to insert some WSSE headers through partnerlink, from security aspect I have separate blog entry for this thread: http://chintanblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/have-been-playing-around-with-ws-basic.html but here I am more interested in inserting and extracting headers using BPEL partnerlink.

I deployed this BPEL process and changed my partnerlink URL port to 1234 to test using obtunnel.bat. I started soasuite/bpel/bin/obtunnel.bat and kick-off the BPEL process, here is the intercepted request payload:

I can see my custom headers as well as wsse headers in my SOAP envelope Header, therefore it is working great!!!

Extracting Headers in BPEL in-bound:

I will try to extract three different types of headers:

1) Complex XSD element

2) Simple XSD element

3) WSSE headers

To extract headers I need to define elements which I need to extract, I created following XSD file which represent my simple and complex XSD header elements.

I also need to define wsse headers. Ideally I should download the XSD defined by OASIS for WSSE (http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd) in my project and create variable of the elements already defined in this XSD. Upon loading this XSD project, I got numourous issues so left that approach and created my own XSD element for reprsenting WSSE security header as shown below.

Now I created three variables and pass them to receive activity. BPEL PM takes care of populating them from SOAP headers...

I just deployed this process and I could see both my custom headers and wsse headers are populated nicely...

Source code can be downloaded from this link.