Automating the BPMN-BPEL “Interleaving” Solution
Antoine of Intalio comments on yesterday’s post re the need to tweak BPMN diagrams to make them more BPEL-friendly. One of my complaints had to do with the nasty “interleaving” error that always pops up when you turn on BPEL validation. He references an Intalio presentation at EclipseCon last year, specifically slide 16. I copied his BPMN into my tool (ITP Commerce) and sure enough, it gives the interleaving error:
Getting rid of interleaving errors requires making duplicate copies of some of the diagram nodes so that BPEL’s block structure is happy. In my tool this has to be done by hand, but Antoine sort of suggests that Intalio does this automatically by turning the BPMN into a “directed acyclic graph” and generating BPEL from that. More mathematical gobbledygook to me, but I think he is saying “we fix the interleaving thing automatically” by turning BPMN into a “tree”… I assume under certain conditions. Here is the result from his document:
As you can see, ‘merge’ and ‘do more things’ have been duplicated, but apparently it’s automatic. Sweet. I’m curious, Antoine, does Intalio automatically handle my mixed token diagram from yesterday? And, since those exclusive merge gateways are really optional in BPMN - uncontrolled merge means the same thing in this case - does Intalio require you to draw them?
8 comments April 5th, 2008