Managing Conversations

Business processes and clients can communicate multiple times to complete a single task. Also, multiple clients can communicate with the same business process at the same time. Conversations provide a straightforward way to keep track of data between calls and to ensure that a service always responds to the right client.

Conversations uniquely identify a communication between a client and a service, so that messages are always returned to the correct client.

Conversations maintain state between calls to a service, that is, they keep track of the data associated with a particular client between calls. Conversations ensure that the data associated with a particular client is saved until it is no longer needed or the operation is complete.

To learn about conversations in business processes, see the following topics:

How Do I: Specify the Conversation Lifetime?

You use the @jws:conversation-lifetime annotation in the JPD file to specify the maximum age and the maximum idle-time for a conversation. The valid specifications for conversation lifetime include:

To Specify the jws:conversation-lifetime Annotation

  1. In WebLogic Workshop, switch to the Source View if necessary.
  2. Click the JPD file class declaration. The Property Editor displays the conversation-lifetime property, which includes the default settings for max-idle-time and max-age.
  3. Click the relevant field to in the Property Editor to change the settings for max-idle-time and max-age. The annotation is written into the JPD source code, immediately preceding the class declaration. For example, in a scenario in which the max-age is specified as 5 days, the following annotation is created in the JPD file:
  4. ::
    * @jws:conversation-lifetime max-age="5 day"
    */: 
    

How Do I: Manage Conversations When Using a JPD Proxy?

You can use the JpdProxySession interface to set and get the conversation ID used when a business process is invoked using a JPD proxy. To learn how, see About Conversation Management in Calling Business Processes. The JpdProxySession is in the WebLogic Integration Javadoc, which is available at the following URL:

http://e-docs.bea.com/wli/docs81/javadoc/com/bea/wli/bpm/proxy/JpdProxySession.html

Related Topics

Overview Conversations

Designing Conversational Web Services

@jws:conversation-lifetime Annotation

Calling Business Processes

Previous Document