Partner Link
For an easy way to create and use partner link types and partner links, see the key Process Developer feature, What are Participants?.
A partner link is a communication exchange between two partners. In the most basic form, the process is a partner link of an external service, receiving a request from it. A partner link defines the role that the process plays (if any) and the role that the partner service plays (if any) in the particular exchange. A partner link can be declared globally or within a scope.
A partner link definition consists of:
- •A name
- •A partner link type
- •At least one role and can include two roles
- •Role names of MyRole, which is the process role, and PartnerRole
- •Optional property called Initialize Partner Role
- •Optional properties for Adding Comments to a Process and Adding Documentation to a Process
- •Optional properties for Declaring Extension Elements and Attributes
In a BPEL process, you use the partner link when defining Web service interaction activities. For example, a receive activity specifies a partner link, its port type and operation. The port type comes from the associated partner link type. This means that the process can accept incoming message data from the service playing the partner role defined in the partner link.
At a minimum, a process must have one partner link for each particular communication exchange it is engaged in. BPEL allows for multiple partner links of the same partner link type to exist within a process.
By default, a partner link is declared at the process level. You can declare a partner link at a scope level. The partner link name must be unique among the set of partner links defined by the process or scope.
TheInitialize Partner Role property is provided as a hint to the deployer of a process. This property does not affect the runtime behavior of the process. If the process contains logic to initialize its partner links then it should set this property to No. This type of initialization would occur through the use of an assign activity. If the process requires its deployment environment to initialize its partner links, either through a static endpoint at deployment or perhaps through an endpoint reference scheme like WS-Addressing, then it should set this property to Yes. If the property is missing, then there is no information conveyed to the deployer as to how the partner links are initialized.
Add a partner link automatically to the process:
Partner links are automatically added to the process when you drop a WSDL operation onto the Process Editor canvas and complete a wizard to create a receive, invoke, reply, onMessage, or onEvent. If you must create a new operation, you can use the Operation Wizard. These are the recommended techniques for creating partner links. For more information, see Creating an Activity by Starting with a WSDL Interface.
Add a new partner link manually to the process:
- 1. From the Outline view, right-mouse click on Participant Partner Link and select Add Process Service Consumer or Partner Service Provider.
- 2. For further details, see Creating a New Partner Service Interface.
XML Syntax
Example
<partnerLink name="seller"
partnerLinkType="AuctionHouse_SellerLT"
myRole="AuctionHouse" partnerRole="Seller"
</partnerLink>