ActiveVOS Server User’s Guide

Creating a Standard or External Service Endpoint for My Role Partner Links

Service endpoints provide a means of sending a message to the ActiveVOS engine that either create a new process instance or get routed to an existing process instance.

In the standard deployment, a service endpoint is created for each entry point of the BPEL process deployed. The entry point is identified in the process deployment descriptor (PDD) as a partner link entry with a My Role attribute. The SOAP binding styles of RPC Encoded, RPC Literal, or Document Literal result in a Web service endpoint deployed to Axis, ActiveVOS’s internal Web service framework. When the endpoint is invoked, the Web service framework marshals the data from the SOAP message into a suitable data structure and sends the data to the ActiveVOS engine.

To use a custom invocation framework, you can set the binding style in the PDD file to External. In this case, no endpoint is deployed to Axis. The custom endpoint can be managed external to the ActiveVOS engine.

For example, you may want to:

Customize entry points into a BPEL process to include security and logging capabilities
Take advantage of environment-specific bindings that your application server may offer

ActiveVOS Server provides solutions for dispatching a message directly to the engine for Java-based application servers. A Server Java Bean (EJB) is available. This EJB allows an external endpoint implementation to dispatch a message to the engine when the endpoint is invoked. The J2EE for Web Services specification details how to package an EJB or servlet as a Web service.

The following illustration shows an overview of the external and standard implementations of My Role service endpoints.

For details, see Standard vs. External Publishing of Service Endpoints for My Role Partner Links.