BPEL Designer for Eclipse: how to debug a BPEL process

Question

I'm trying to debug a BPEL process. I made it using BPEL Designer for Eclipse (3.7.2), i'm using Ode 1.3 as engine.

I have no idea how to debug my process. I can deploy it on ode in a debug session but I don't really understand what can i do after that.

Answer 1

You can deploy BPEL processes developed in WS-BPEL 2.0 standard on WSO2 BPS server. Once you deploy the BPEL process on WSO2 Business Process Server, you can use following mechanisms to debug/troubleshoot failures.

1.Using Message Tracer. This enables you to view the inbound and outbound messages to and from BPS server. To enable message trace logs for BPEL processes;

Add the following entries to the $CARBON-HOME/lib/log4j.properties

log4j.logger.org.apache.ode.bpel.messagetrace=TRACE log4j.logger.org.wso2.carbon.bpel.messagetrace=TRACE

The preferred log4j appender should be configured such that it has a threshold of TRACE level. If CARBON_LOGFILE is the log4j appender, it should be changed as follows. By default this is set to DEBUG.

eg - log4j.appender.CARBON_LOGFILE.threshold=TRACE

Re-start the server.

2.Using the Event table in the 'Instance Information' page (Figure 1). Each and every activity should have 3 events upon the successful execution. If an activity only has 2 events or if it has an "ActivityFailureEvent", then something must have gone wrong within that particular activity. You may need to refer the log file of WSO2 BPS server in-order to further investigate on the issue.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, the open source tools for BPEL debugging are very limited. Although ODE provides APIs to suspend and resume processes at break points, the current tools don't make use of it. I'd recommend to enable the DebugBpelEventListener, which outputs the execution events to the configured logger. This usually helps to understand what is going on.