Comparing BizTalk Orchestration Constructs with BPEL

In the sample Orchestration we built in the previous section, we saw a few Orchestration shapes and found that they are quite similar to the BPEL constructs. In this section we will look at them and the others more closely.

Receive and Send Shapes (<receive>, <invoke>, <reply>)

Messages are received and sent to the ports (partnerLinks) within the BizTalk Orchestration using the Receive and Send shapes. These are equivalent to the <receive>, <reply>, or <invoke> keywords of BPEL. Note that the same Send shape is used to send messages for both One-Way (Asynchronous <invoke>) and Request-Response (Synchronous <reply>) calls.

You need configure the Receive shapes by specifying things such as which type of message to receive along with any filter condition, which port to receive from, whether to create a new instance of the Orchestration upon receiving a message, and initializing or following correlation...