This activity enables you to define the external services with which your process interacts. A partner link type characterizes the conversational relationship between two services by defining the roles played by each service in the conversation and specifying the port type provided by each service to receive messages within the conversation. For example, if you create a process to interact with a Credit Rating Service and two loan provider services (United Loan and Star Loan), you create partner links for all three services.

Figure A-24 shows the Partner Link dialog in BPEL 2.0. You provide the following details:

• A meaningful name for the service.

• The web services description language (WSDL) file of the external service.

• The actual service type (defined as Partner Link Type).

• The role of the service (defined as Partner Role).

• The role of the process requesting the service (defined as My Role).

For more information about partner links, see Invoking an Asynchronous Web Service from a BPEL Process.