By default, dehydration points are set on activities such as a receive, onMessage, onAlarm, and wait. The dehydrate activity enables you to explicitly specify a dehydration point. This activity acts as a dehydration point to automatically maintain long-running asynchronous processes and their current state information in a database while they wait for asynchronous callbacks. Storing the process in a database preserves the process and prevents any loss of state or reliability if a system shuts down or a network problem occurs. This feature increases both BPEL process reliability and scalability.

The bpelx:dehydrate extension implements dehydration. For BPEL projects that support BPEL version 1.1, the syntax is as follows:

<bpelx:dehydrate name="DehydrateInstance"/>

For BPEL projects that support BPEL version 2.0, the syntax is as shown in the following example:

<extensionActivity>
      <bpelx:dehydrate name="DehydrateInstance"/>
 </extensionActivity>

Figure A-11 shows the Dehydrate dialog in BPEL 2.0.