Issue 52 - Rough Draft of Proposal To Vote

["Yaron Y. Goland" <ygoland@bea.com>]

Processes sending themselves messages is so common that a special 
Internet address, 127.0.0.1, had to be introduced to enable it. But in 
BPEL's case the loop back address is an EPR and its definition will be 
largely implementation specific. The proposal given below defines a 
portable mechanism to express looback semantics in BPEL.

Proposal:

Change the partnerLink schema to:

<partnerLinks>
      <partnerLink name="ncname" partnerLinkType="qname"
           myRole="ncname"? partnerRole="ncname"?
           partnerIsSelf="Boolean"?>+
      </partnerLink>
</partnerLinks>

Add the following text to the end of section 7.2:

If the partnerIsSelf attribute is set to true then it indicates that the 
partnerRole points to the BPEL process instance in which the partnerLink 
is being used. The default value of the partnerIsSelf attribute is 
false. partnerIsSelf is used to support internal communication so that a 
BPEL process instance can send messages to itself. By specifying 
partnerIsSelf="true" the BPEL engine knows that it needs to provide a 
binding for the partnerRole that points at the BPEL process instance.