Sunday, December 5, 2010

Indirectly referenced variables in BPEL

or "Dynamically specified XPaths in BPEL"

Let's assume I have a String variable "counter",
and I want to do a lookup on a collection MyCollection accessing its MyElement number "counter".

In Java it would be Element element = myCollection.get(counter).

In BPEL you have to toil a lot more even to do the simplest thing:



                    
                        
                        
                    
                    
                        
                        
                    
                


If Counter contains 4,
Temp_Variable will contain a string "/ns2:MyCollection/ns2:MyElement[4]"
which will be evaluated as a XPath by the second "copy" statement.

One can - more effectively - use dynamic indexing:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12483_01/integrate.1013/b28981/manipdoc.htm#CIHGBJCE




Why do simple things in Java, when you can do overly complicated programming in XML?

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