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Subject: [wsbpel] Issue - 107 - Proposal to Vote



This proposal affects spec section 15 (Extensions for Business
Protocols). I'm not going to do spec wording. This is split into four 
parts: base, activities, expressions, and attributes.

---

Base (w/ background):

In abstract processes, operational details may be abstracted away
either through the omission of specific BPEL elements or attributes
listed in the specification, and/or through the use of opaque tokens. 
Its abstract status states that any concrete realizations of it may 
perform additional processing steps that are not relevant to the 
audience to which it has been given.

It must be stressed that opaque entities (activities, etc) are not the
only points of extension allowable in creating a process derived from or
related to an abstract process that uses them. In particular, a related
executable process MAY contain additional processing steps (activities,
fault handlers, etc) and  parterLinks including the extras that may be
required to carry these out(correlation sets, variables).

Opaque entities:

Part  A - Opaque activities:

An activity called 'opaque' shall be introduced for the exclusive use of
abstract processes. An opaque activity explicitly hides a concrete BPEL 
activity whose behavior is not relevant to the recipient/user of the 
abstract process.  An opaque activity is a BPEL activity and therefore 
has the same standard elements and attributes that all BPEL activities 
have (see spec section 11.1 and 11.2).

Examples of using opaque activities include, but are not restricted to,
creating process templates (marking the points of normative extension
in a process) and edge cases where simple omission of an activity
creates a syntactic problem, e.g., if the omitted activity is a join
point for several links.

At first glance, it seems that this could instead be done using "empty" 
, but the difference is that "empty" explicitly says "I do nothing 
here," whereas "opaque" is really saying "some magic occurs here but 
it's hidden on purpose".


PART B - Opaque expressions (incl assignment):

Opaque assignment (<from opaque="yes") is used for capturing variable 
creation/modification in a yet-to-be-concretized mechanism/fashion. An 
example of usage is to express non-determinism: the obvious case being a 
process that needs to show a decision point with alternative outcomes 
without specifying how the decision is reached. In this case the 
expressions that constrain each branch may need to be left unspecified, 
but it may also be convenient to make a specific value or quantity such 
as a price threshold unspecified, so that explicitly specified 
conditions relative to the threshold become non-deterministic as a 
result of the threshold value being unknown.

In addition to <from opaque="yes"/>, this proposal asks for allowing 
transitionConditions  to be opaque. This avoids the default "true" 
value. If an expression is opaque, the expressionLanguage attribute on 
it is meaningless since there is no expression syntax to refer to.

-sample syntax:
<transitionCondition opaque="yes"/>

PART C - Opaque attributes:

No change to the spec.

(background info on why not attributes: They were originally proposed to
make all hiding explicit but there was a lot of resistance to that. 
Then, they were proposed  for attributes that have defaults in BPEL - 
but all the examples that were put forward created more agony than the 
uniformity  using opaque would have brought to the table. The reason was 
that they are core to the semantics of the constructs they are attached 
to. Examples include suppressJoinFailure, isolated (scopes), 
createInstance, and initiate (correlation sets). Therefore, I propose no 
change to the spec.)


--- Rania



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