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Subject: RE: [wsbpel] invoke/receive-callback race conditions, even in the 1.1 sample (p.22)


Hello Francico,

> But, again, it is a statement about the
> implementation environment, not about the correctness or validity of the
> process.

If common business process modelling asumes, that the runtime engine behaves correct in this situation (and I dont see a clean way for the runtime engine to do that), then the process is valid _only_ if the spec allows this asumption. I dont see any implementation constraints in the spec, and therefore the sample is highly unreliable.

Note: possible solutions for fixing this problem in the engine includes: reordering of activation (receive before invoke), pre-traversal of soon to be enabled activities to make correlation entries before invoke is commited, delay negative acceptance of incoming web service requests with unmatched correlation, till engine signals "stable" state (all activites activated), ...

All of them are hard work and not clean, since dealing with timeouts and making the system less perfomrant. Therefore personally I would vote for a syntactic regulation, not an implementation constraint.

Greetings
Bernd

                                                                                                                                                    
                      "Eckenfels.                                                                                                                   
                      Bernd"                   To:       <wsbpel@lists.oasis-open.org>                                                              
                      <B.Eckenfels@seeb        cc:                                                                                                  
                      urger.de>                Subject:  [wsbpel] invoke/receive-callback race conditions, even in the 1.1 sample (p.22)            
                                                                                                                                                    
                      07/04/2003 11:56                                                                                                              
                      AM                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                                    




Hello,

in the 1.1 spec, there is a sample on p.22 featuring call back ports for
the result of price calculation. This sample suffers from a possible race
condition:

<sequence>
  <invoke operation="initiatePriceCalc" />
  <invoke operation="sendShippingPrice" />
  <receive operation="sendInvoice" />
</sequence>

In this sample, requesting a invoice by Purchase Order, the second invoke
adding shipping infos, and the reply waiting for the calculated invoice. So
depending on the runtime engine, the receive activity might not get
activated before the response is already received. Besides the fact, that
this sample is not dealing with correlations, it might be rewritten as:

<flow>
  <receive />
  <sequence>
    <invoke />
    <invoke />
  </sequence>

But this still is open for a race condition (as the activation sequence of
a flow is undefined).

So, we beed to address two issues here:

a) is it required for the enactment service to support receives which are
depending (by link or sequence) on the completion of invokes. If yes, how
deep this dependency should be allowed. If it is not required for the
enactment, then the sample is illegally constructed.

b) if we do not allow the sequencing and declare the sample as broken, then
an alternative notation with a flow may be used, but also requires some
sematic definitions:

'flows are activated top down, this meens if a receive activity in a flow
is before the invoke (with no links), then engines have to gurantee, that
the corellation entry is made before the service is invoked.'

or

'flows are activated, so that all ready receicves are invoked before ready
invokes.'

We have the problem, that we can't use links to express a relationship like
"if the receive has established the orrelation entry, then invoke". The
other problem is, that my proposed regulation for flow does not help with
receives, which are not directly nested below the flow. For example a

<flow>
  <sequence>
    <receive />
    ..
  </sequence>
  <invoke>
</flow>

does not reliable work with the "first all receive" nor with the "top down
activation" definition.


I started this discussion, to ensure my understanding of the situation is
correct. If you agree, I will raise a formal issue.

Note: this is also reláted to issue 31, because generating a UUID is a
requirement for the b) solution.

Greetings
Bernd

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