This activity invokes compensation on an inner scope activity that has successfully completed. This activity can be invoked only from within a fault handler or another compensation handler. Compensation occurs when a process cannot complete several operations after completing others. The process must return and undo the previously completed operations. For example, assume a process is designed to book a rental car, a hotel, and a flight. The process books the car and the hotel, but cannot book a flight for the correct day. In this case, the process performs compensation by unbooking the car and the hotel.The compensation handler is invoked with the compensate activity, which names the scope on which the compensation handler is to be invoked.

Figure A-8 shows the Compensate dialog in BPEL 1.1. You can perform the following tasks:

• Click the General tab to provide the activity with a meaningful name.

• Select the scope activity on which to invoke the compensation handler.

In BPEL 2.0, the Compensate dialog includes a Documentation tab.

For more information about the compensate activity, see Using Compensation After Undoing a Series of Operations.