Siebel Web Service with SoapUI

I was working with Siebel webservices for Query Customer and found that it was working fine from BPEL but when I try from soapUI, it returns junk characters. Upon intercepting both traffic using tcpmon, we found the issue was in one of the HTTP header. Basically "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" which was sent from SoapUI was causing the problem.

In soapUI, you can disable this particular header via following option. Once the option is enabled, you can invoke Siebel web service doesn't return junk data and returns valid XML data.

Java forever

Not related with Oracle SOA. It was just fun to watch this after a long busy day .. Java forever

BPEL Version Redirect

I was working with the client and we had situation were multiple BPEL process versions were deployed with one of them being the default version (e.g. 1.0, 2.0*, 3.0). If client is using is version agnostic WSDL and end point URL, (as below), then it is not major concern because BPEL will route it to default version and everything will work like a charm.

http://host:port/orabpel/<domain>/<process>/<process>?wsdl

http://host:port/orabpel/<domain>/<process>

That was not the case we had. One of the client was using version specific URL, and we didn’t have time and control over the client to change their URL right away. Of course, the long term solution would be use version agnostic URL, gateway or UDDI, but here is quick and dirty way if we just want to route old version request to new version using Apache redirect rule.

This basically routes the request from old-version to new-version for WSDL or End-Point request. If we want to make it generalize, to redirect all versions to a specific version (doesn't matter if that is default or not), it would be following. This can come pretty handy if version management goes out of hand..

After making it generalized, I thought of taking this approach to the next level. As all of us know that to utilize ESB->BPEL native binding (which is highly recommended by Oracle, especially in AIA world), we have to configure routing rules to point to specific version of BPEL process. Every time new version of BPEL is deployed it causes routing rule to change. I thought may be I can fool ESB with this redirect even if it is using native binding, but this trick but didn’t work out with native binding.

XSLT Troubleshooting

May be it is just based on my experience, but I feel in general XSLT doesn’t have lot of troubleshooting support. E.g. in Java, no matter what JVM you use, you can pretty much get stack trace (even in NPE errors). In XSLT, based on XML parser you use, sometime you get line numbers and some time you don’t, plus it doesn't provide lot of details in log. Moreover there are not really any good tools to do much troubleshooting. In AIA world, it gets even crazier. Most of the XSLT functions come with AIA just runs only on server side, so you are hopeless and helpless when you want to do some troubleshooting on your local box. It gets even worse, when you get FOTY0001 type errors. Sometime you get more details in log file when there is FOTY0001, and sometime you don't.

Here are couples of ideas which can make your life easier.

1) XSL comment
You can put XSL comment in your code, so it will show up when XSLT is completed. It does help a lot when you are trying to just print values of variables. Pretty much all credit goes to Mahesh Narayanaswamy (absolute XSL genius) for this suggestion.

2) XSL out
This was very cool idea came out of disucssion with Amol Vaidya. XSL comment didn’t help much when XSLT was completely breaking and we were unable to get the line number or the root cause. All we needed is the similar capability like System.out inside the XSL, so we know how far in XSL we went and what are the variables. We just want to get all information before the point of failure. A custom XSLT log function came pretty handy for putting trace log in your XSLT. This way we can get as much information about the XSLT before the point of failure.
We wrote custom XSL function called XSLTLog, and registered that function in BPEL RT and ESB XSL Library.

3) Java code
I also wrote a Java code which can take XML input and execute the XSL. We have to register this Java code to the server as lot of AIA XSL functions relies on server side components. We also took it further to find exact line number in XSL using binary search approach.

BPEL ReadOnly Console

It was my first blog which I wrote almost three years ago. http://chintanblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-saw-numerous-people-asking-about-bpel_290.html Since then, pretty much all my clients and a lot of other companies used this approach. I also saw many other blogs copied this idea or put enhancement to it. Anyways, one of my client pointed out this metalink article: 852840.1. Metalink had reference to my blog!! Wow, it certainly makes me feel good when multi billion dollar organization put reference to my tiny little site.

On a smaller scale, but it still reminds what Margaret said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has"

TCP Tunnel - Java Port Forwarding - TCP kill

You know, sometime you just get amazed when you find an absolutely simple solution for a overly complicated problem. I was working with one client remotely and banging my head against the wall to get the access to their valuable servers. After a so much frustration I could get access to one or two servers via ssh, and that's pretty much it. I could ping to everywhere from that UNIX box but can not connect anything from my local laptop.

To make long story short, I tried using SSH tunnel, hacked routing tables of UNIX/windows but nothing came as handy as a simple Socket program which basically listens on a port and make socket connection to remote client. It is very much like TcpMon or Obtunnel but it is just bare bone version of it. Pretty much 99% of my laptop traffic was going through this tiny unix box and never had to beg for access.

java -jar springportforward.jar com.springsoa.socket.Forward localport remotehost remoteport &

Now as this become the absolutely life savor, I thought I can I can leverage something more out of it. I think we potentially can use this for tcpkill workaround. Basically try to forward all traffic through portforward, and kill the portforward to achieve same effect as tcpkill.

BPEL Set Title

BPEL titles are extremely important for troubleshooting anything from BPELConsole. It is basically providing title-name to BPEL instance. I also wrote blog on how to do wildcard search on those BPEL titles (http://chintanblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/bpel-title-wildcard-search_01.html).

Now the part comes is how to set titles. I am still working on implementing non-intrusive way of setting titles without ever changing BPEL code, but for now let's talk about how it is done Out of the Box:

Recommended Approach is:

I didn't like the idea of Java embed, just as it conflicts with other best practices Oracle has and it creates an additional workItem overhead for BPEL RT. Correct way of doing this would be to write BPEL function to do this. I wrote BPEL function as below:

ora:setProcessTitle()

This function sets the title of BPEL process
The signature of this function is : ora:setProcessTitle ('title', 'auditTrail'?)
auditTrail: true/false, it is optional and default value is true.

With this, you can set the title as native assign operation:

It doesn't reduce the code footprint that much, but still provides neater BPEL code and centralized way of handling Audit.