Compensate bug in Oracle BPEL PM ?

Question

Hi,
I am making some tests using BPEL 10.2. 2 patch 1 and I think that Oracle BPEL PM does not adhere to Compensate specifications.
According to the BPEL specs, a compensation handler is only executed when its scope has been executed completely and finished normally. Normally means no fault is thrown, even if it is caught and not rethrown.
But I have made an example:
- I have 2 nested scopes. There is a compensation handler in the inner scope and a catchall handler in the outer scope which calls the inner compensate handler.
- The inner scope throws a fault, throwing a Java exception inside a Java Embedding activity.
- As no inner scope fault handler is defined, outer scope error handler is called. And this error handler calls the inner scope compensation handler.
- This call to the inner scope compensation handler should not have occurred, because the inner scope did not finish normally.
I should be very grateful if somebody can tell me what is wrong.
Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

Hi,
did you find a solution for that?
I got a similar problem in my process. It consists of two parallel scopes (each with a compensation handler). Both compensate activities are defined in the fault handler of the parent scope. If an exception is raised in one of the parallel scopes, i would expect the BPEL PM to complete and compensate the other scope (according to the BPEL specs). In fact, the BPEL PM stops the execution of both scopes and invokes both compensation handlers.
In my tests this unexpected behaviour caused some data inconsistencies. If this behaviour is not a bug, it would be a serious limitation to the definition of business transactions in BPEL in my eyes.
Thanks for any help in advance.