XSL Refresh 10g

It is always good practice to have all XSD outside the BPEL and ESB project and refer them via http url (or oramds in 11g). All XSL remains in the BPEL or ESB, and changes to XSL requires redeployment.

We have lot of logic in XSL especially in AIA, and lot of XSL can be reused. We thought of exploring the option of doing real time changes to XSL.

Option 1: XSL embedded in BPEL process
If XSL is embedded in BPEL process, the XSL is cached inside the transformation engine. Fortunately, XSL function used by BPEl and ESB provides ways to initialize the cache. com.collaxa.cube.xml.xpath.functions.xml.GetElementFromXSLTFunction provide initializeCache function. So if you deploy a Java class in the same JVM as BPEL RT, then it can call this method and reinit the XSL cache. I did the same, created a Java class which calls GetElementFromXSLTFunction initializeCache and then exposed that piece of code as a WebService.

Here are detailed steps:

• (one time) Deploy the the XSL Refresh web service (download) to same container as BPEL
  
• Change the XSL from $ORACLE_HOME/bpel/domains/domain-name/tmp/.bpel.../.. as your need
  
• go to: http://host:port/XSLTRefresh/RefreshXSLTPoolSoapHttpPort and hit invoke
  

This will ensure that new XSL changes will be in effect immediately. This approach came quite handy during development phase as I could avoid redeploying AIA processes for XSL changes and could have better turn around. Option 2: XSL on Apache Server I think cleaner way would be to Putting XSLs outside the BPEL project and deploy them separately from the BPEL and ESB deployment. E.g.

<from expression="ora:processXSLT('http://host:7777/xsl/Transform_IP_OP_Sample.xsl',bpws:getVariableData('inputVariable','payload'))"/>

BPEL XSL engine doesn't cache the XSL handle if it is http based, but you can use the xsl refresh webservice if you see any issue depending on BPEL version you are using.