Batch Processing Using Oracle BPEL

Ever needed to create a BPEL process where you have to do batch processing? I will explain how you can create a simple BPEL process which will process a customer file and once all customer records are processed invoke next process. Figure on the left shows the overall process diagram.
Input is a simple csv file which has three fields, Customer Name, Address1 and Address2. Just create a simple file which has three records.
Now Create a partner link using File Reader Adapter. You should enable the “Files Contain Multiple Messages”. Choose a very high number (999999999) in the “Publish Messages in Batches of” field. like shown below

Now we have to create two new variables. One to hold the total number of records(count) and another one to keep track of the iterations (iterator). You can get the total record count using countNodes function. Use this function for you customer node (ora:countNodes(‘receiveInput_Read_InputVariable_1′,’Root-Element’,’/ns2:Root-Element/ns2:customer’)
Assign a constan value 1 to the iteration function. Next you have to create a while process. Use the expression ‘iterator'<=’count’ as your while condition. Now in the while process, you can assign each file record field to input variable of the next invoke process. Remember that when we enabled multiple messages to be loaded, BPEL will load all records into memmory array. So now you have to use iterator as index of the array to process record by record. You can use the getElement function for this purpose (ora:getElement(‘receiveInput_Read_InputVariable_1′,’Root-Element’,’/ns2:Root-Element/ns2:customer/ns2:Name’,
bpws:getVariableData(‘iterator’)))
See how I am using iterator as index value. This expression fetches Name element from the first node of Customer. Once all elements from the Customer nodes are copied to destination variables, increment ‘iterator’ by one. Now you can add your next process after the while loop, so that will be started after processing all file records.