categories of faults

["Trickovic, Ivana" <ivana.trickovic@sap.com>]

Hi all,

On Monday we were discussing different kinds of faults in BPEL. It is probably worth to identify different categories of faults in order to better organize the discussion and finally see if there is a new issue.

The following faults categories could be identified:
* Application/process-level faults: these faults are listed in Appendix A (Standards Faults) of the BPEL specification. 
In this category belong also fault messages that may be output of a WSDL operation. If an <invoke> activity performs a synchronous operation that receives a fault message it will be terminated and the fault will be implicitly thrown.
* Protocol-level faults: these faults are raised by the underlying protocols; the question is whether these faults are all propagated up to the process level 
* System faults: these faults are raised by process engines executing BPEL processes; from my point of view, these faults are non-recoverable and cannot be propagated up to the process level.  

Your thoughts?

Ivana