Dynamic parallel flow

In Chapter 2 we became familiar with the<flow> activity, which enables us to start several parallel activities. In our TravelApproval process example, we have used<flow> activity to start two parallel sequences that acquired plane ticket offers from American and Delta Airline web services. As the operation invocation for the ticket offer has been asynchronous, we had to use a<receive> activity to wait for the callbacks.

The problem with the<flow> activity is that we need to know in advance how many parallel activities are required. The number of parallel activities is specified by the BPEL code. In several real-world use cases this is limiting because the number of required parallel branches can depend on the information stored in a variable or received from the partner web service. In such cases,<flow> activity is inadequate.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g therefore provides<flowN> activity, which can create multiple parallel activities at...