Most of the time, your
business process interacts with other web services and will exchange data then.
The BPEL process itself acts as a web service. This palette element provides all the
activities that a BPEL process needs while interacting with partner links.
Invoke
The Invoke activity enables the business process to invoke a One-Way or
Request-Response operation on a portType offered by a partner. The operation is
defined in the partner's WSDL file.
In our AirAlliance example, the business process invokes an operation exposed
by the NorthAir Web Service. The operation is called processItinerary. When you
drag-and-drop the invoke activity from the palette into the designer, you will get a
Property Editor window, where you can set Correlations, choose Partner Link, and
corresponding operations.
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Partner Links should have already been created to use the invoke activity. When you
drag-and-drop a web service into the designer, you will be prompted to create a new
Partner Link. Invoke is a web service call addressed to a service endpoint, or URL.
If the service is long-running, the calling process waits for a callback message in a
Receive or Pick activity, reporting that the task has completed and is returning
result data.
Correlation sets on Invoke activities deal with outbound operations.
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