Eclipse BPEL Designer: Select Type of variable

Question

I am new to BPEL and I have installed BPEL Designer in Eclipse Juno along with Apache ode to test some simple bpel examples, such as the ones presented in

http://www-inf.int-evry.fr/cours/WebServices/TP_BPEL/whileloop.html

However, when I proceed to step 5 of this tutorial:

"Click on the variable iterator, in the Properties view, select Details->Browse"..,

...the browse button does not seem to work. (It can be clicked but no window to select appears.)

I was wondering if someone else has faced the same problem (is it an Eclipse bug?).

It could be a bug in the designer plugin. From what I have experienced, the BPEL Designer in eclipse is not that stable, unfortunately. To solve your problem, I would suggest to directly edit the source code and set type="ns1:int" manually. — joergl
Thanks @joergl for your response. So you mean adding something like <bpel:variable name="iterator" type="ns1:int"></bpel:variable>, but that implies that I should also declare ns1, correct? If yes, do I have to declare it in the process tag of the bpel file?Thanks, in advance! — myrpap
yes, your process tag should look something like: <process name="WhileSample" xmlns:ns1="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" ...> — joergl
thanx @joergl for your detailed response. Data types can be set correctly (eventhough you have to restart the ide to take effect).BTW, do you happen to know why the variable initialization window does not always appear? For example, now I probably corrected the previous issue but in many cases I get messages like The variable temp isn't properly initialized,etc. This designer is really frustrating... — myrpap
This designer is really frustrating: I can totally sign that ;-) I don't know the reasons for its instability, but I would strongly encourage you to write the code in an XML editor directly. Another alternative is to use Netbeans with the SOA plugin which comes with a superb visual BPEL editor. For the question here: Would a summary of the above discussion qualify as an answer? — joergl

joergl joergl · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-11T12:27:23

Summarizing the discussion from the comments:

The BPEL Designer plugin in eclipse seems rather unstable, at least according to my personal experience. As found out by myrpap however, it seems to work fine in Helios, so one solution would be to use that version instead of Juno.

The option I would suggest is to skip the visual editor altogether and edit the code directly. To set the type of the variable, the appropriate element and namespace definitions have to be added to the process definition. The result should look somehow like this:

<process
    name="WhileSample"
    targetNamespace="http://while.bpel.tps"
    xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/process/executable"
    xmlns:ns1="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" >
    <import .../>
    <partnerLinks... />
    <variables>
        <variable name="iterator" type="ns1:int"/>
    </variables>
    <!-- main sequence goes here -->
</process>

Eclipse BPEL Designer: Select Type of variable

1 Answers