You can use an if activity when conditional behavior is required for specific activities to decide between two or more branches. Only one activity is selected for execution from a set of branches. The if activity consists of a list of one or more conditional branches that are considered for execution in the following order:

• The if branch

• Optional elseif branches

• An optional else branch

The first branch whose condition evaluates to true is taken, and its contained activity is performed. If no branch with a condition is taken, then the else branch is taken (if present). The if activity is complete when the contained activity of the selected branch completes, or immediately when no condition evaluates to true and no else branch is specified.

The if activity is a BPEL version 2.0 feature that replaces the switch activity that was included in BPEL version 1.1.

The following example shows the if activity syntax:

<if standard-attributes>
   standard-elements
   <condition>some conditon expression</condition>
   activity
   <elseif>*
      <condition>some condition expression</condition>
      some activity
   </elseif>
   <else>?
      some activity
   </else>
</if>