An idempotent activity is an activity that can be safely retried. Idempotent activities are applicable to both durable and transient processes. You can manage idempotence at the operation level of a partner link. For example, some partner links can expose multiple operations (for example, getEmployee, depositPayCheck, and so on). You can define some operations as idempotent (for example, getEmployee). This enables these operations to be called multiple times. Other operations may not need to be idempotent (for example, depositPayCheck), and do not require this setting. Dehydration does occur after a nonidempotent operation.

By default, all partner link operations are idempotent. If you want, you can set an operation to be nonidempotent. This setting provides the same functionality as the idempotent deployment descriptor property, but at the more granular, operational level.

For more information about the idempotent deployment descriptor property, see What You May Need to Know About the idempotent Property and Fault Handling and Introduction to Deployment Descriptor Properties.