How to Translate Inbound Native Data to XML Stored as an Attachment

This section describes how to translate an inbound message in native data format to an attachment. Attachments are useful for scenarios in which incoming data is very large.

To translate inbound native XSD format to an attachment:

Create a BPEL process (for this example, a one-way BPEL process is created).
Right-click the BPEL process in the SOA Composite Editor, and select Edit.

Oracle BPEL Designer is displayed.
Expand the Oracle Extensions section of the Components window and drag a Translate activity into the BPEL process.
Right-click the translate activity, and select Edit.

The Translate dialog is displayed for editing.
Select Native to XML to translate inbound native data into an attachment.
To the right of the Input field, click the Browse (first) icon.
Select the input variable (for this example, a very large string). Figure 6-22 provides details.

Figure 6-22 Input Variable Selection

Description of "Figure 6-22 Input Variable Selection"
To the right of the NXSD Schema field, select the Search (first) icon to invoke the Type Chooser dialog.
Select the schema file, and click OK. This example uses the same schema file as How to Translate Native Data to XML Data. Figure 6-23 provides details.

Figure 6-23 Schema File Selection

Description of "Figure 6-23 Schema File Selection"
From the Output Type list, select ATTACHMENT.

The dialog is refreshed to display the Location field.
In the Location field, enter the directory path to the attachment. If this field is left blank, the attachment is stored in the database.
To the right of the Output field, click the Add (second) icon to invoke the Create Variable dialog.
Click OK to create the output variable. The output variable is of type attachment.

The Translate dialog looks as shown in Figure 6-24.

Figure 6-24 Translate Dialog for an Attachment

Description of "Figure 6-24 Translate Dialog for an Attachment"
Click OK.
In the Applications window, select the BPEL process file.
Click Source.
Note that the location you specified for the attachment is copied to an href attribute. The href attribute is part of the variable of type attachment that was created in Step 12.
```
. . .
<copy>
  <from> '/scratch/sbandyop/tmp/out/dhqa_addr_att.xml'</from>
  <to> $Translate1_OutputVar_1/@href</to>
</copy>
. . .
```
In the Applications window, select the BPEL process WSDL file.
Click Source.

Note the attachment code added to the WSDL definitions section of the file and the href attribute that is pointed to by the variable created in Step 12.

. . .
xmlns:attach="http://xmlns.oracle.com/DHQATranslateApp/DHQATranslateToAttach/BPELProcess1/attachment"
. . .
. . .
. . .
   <element name="attachmentElement">
      <complexType>
         <attribute name="href" type="string"/>
      </complexType>
   </element>
. . .
. . .

Design is now complete.