1. Developing SOA Applications with Oracle SOA Suite
  2. Sharing Functionality Across Service Components
  3. Oracle SOA Suite Templates and Reusable Subprocesses
  4. Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite Templates

Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite Templates

A template is a reusable part of an Oracle SOA Suite project that you can use to create new projects. There are three types of templates, as described in Table 40-1.

Table 40-1 Template Types

Template Type Description

SOA project

A complete SOA project packaged and used to start new projects. You can create new SOA composite applications using this template.

Service component

A service component, such as a BPEL 2.0 process (including sensors) packaged for import into other projects. All dependent components and wires are also packaged. It appears as a custom service component in the SOA composite application's Components window.

Custom BPEL scope activity

A scope activity of a BPEL process packaged as a custom activity in the Components window and ready for import into other BPEL projects. This custom activity can potentially surface in the BPEL activity palette of the Components window.

Oracle SOA Suite templates provide the following benefits:

  • Share common code (subpart of a process or a scope) between applications, composites, and processes. You create once, then share with others. The template can be reused multiple times.

  • Store and reuse templates from the Oracle Metadata Services Repository (MDS Repository).

  • Fully editable upon consumption.

  • Automatically discover templates in Oracle JDeveloper. Once the template is saved, it is displayed in the Components window.

  • No inheritance, meaning that future changes to source templates are not visible to applications. If you make changes to the source template, a current user of the template does not see the change.

  • Custom icons are provided for component scope templates.

  • No versioning in templates. To differentiate between versions, you specify the version number in the template name.

  • Support for templates in both the BPEL versions 1.1 and 2.0.

Changes made to a specific template are not propagated to projects previously created using this template. This functionality is achievable through layered customization.

A new annotation is added to the composites/BPEL processes to identify the relationship to a template.

For information about using templates, see Creating and Using a SOA Project Template, Creating and Using a Service Component Template, and Creating and Using a BPEL Scope Activity Template.