Oracle SOA Suite provides a generic fault management framework for handling faults in BPEL processes. If a fault occurs during runtime in an invoke activity in a process, the framework catches the fault and performs a user-specified action defined in a fault policy file associated with the composite or component. Fault policies are applicable to the faults that result from the invoke activity. Faults can occur because of preassertion, postassertion, invocation, or actual business failures in the target service.

If a fault results in a condition in which human intervention is the prescribed action, you perform recovery actions from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. The fault management framework provides an alternative to designing a BPEL process with catch activities in scope activities.

This section provides an overview of the components that comprise the fault management framework.

• The fault management framework catches all faults (business and runtime) for an invoke activity.

• A fault policy file defines fault conditions and their corresponding fault recovery actions. Each fault condition specifies a particular fault or group of faults, which it attempts to handle, and the corresponding action for it. A set of actions is identified by an ID in the fault policy file.

• A set of conditions invokes an action (known as a fault policy).

• Email or JMS notify users of errors associated with a condition.

• A fault policy bindings file associates the policies defined in the fault policy file with the following:

  • SOA composite applications

  • BPEL process and Oracle Mediator service components

  • Reference binding components for BPEL processes and Oracle Mediator service components

  The framework looks for fault policy bindings in the same directory as the composite.xml file of the SOA composite application or in a remote location identified by two properties that you set. The remote location is in the MDS Repository.

  Note:

  A fault policy configured with the fault management framework overrides any fault handling defined in catch activities of scope activities in the BPEL process. The fault management framework can be configured to rethrow the fault handling back to the catch activities.

• The fault policy file (fault-policies.xml) and fault policy bindings file (fault-bindings.xml) are placed in either of the following locations:

  • In the same directory as the composite.xml file of the SOA composite application.

  • In a different location that is specified with two properties that you add to the composite.xml file. This option is useful if a fault policy must be used by multiple SOA composite applications. This option overrides any fault policy files that are included in the same directory as the composite.xml file. The following example provides details about these two properties. In this example, the fault policy files are placed into the SOA part of the Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) Repository shared area.

    <property
     name="oracle.composite.faultPolicyFile">oramds:/apps/faultpolicyfiles/
     fault-policies.xml
    </property>
    <property
     name="oracle.composite.faultBindingFile">oramds:/apps/faultpolicyfiles/
     fault-bindings.xml
    </property>
    

For details about Oracle Mediator fault handling capabilities, see Using Error Handling .

For details about creating a fault policy with Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite, see Chapter "Using Fault Handling in BPM" of Developing Business Processes with Oracle Business Process Management Studio.