Advanced activities

In the previous chapter, we familiarized ourselves with important BPEL activities, including invoking web service operations (<invoke>), receiving messages from partners (<receive>), returning results to process clients (<reply>), declaring variables (<variable>), updating variable contents (<assign>), sequential and concurrent structured activities (<sequence> and<flow>), and conditional behavior (<if>).

However, these activities are not sufficient for complex real-world business processes. Therefore, in the first part of this chapter we will become familiar with the other important activities offered by BPEL, particularly activity names, loops, delays, empty activities, and process termination. We will not discuss concrete use cases where these activities can be used, because they are well known to developers. We will, however, use these activities later in the chapter, where we will present some examples. Let us first...