Dealing with and Compensating for Exceptional Circumstances

Although, of course, we would like to think that everything in our BPEL processes always happens according to our plan for a happy flow, in actual practice that is unlikely to happen. Several types of faults and exceptions are bound to occur and should be catered to. Sometimes we can recover from exceptions—by retrying an operation after a little waiting time or through an alternative execution path. However, some exceptions we have to accept as irrecoverable. For a process instance that runs into such an exception, we may need to roll back some of the work that was already done by the process before it failed with the exception. In BPEL terminology that is called compensation.

Handling Exceptions in BPEL Processes

We can discern a number of exception categories—from fairly technical to more functional and business process-oriented.