SOA Suite 12C: Simple example of using the Spring component

A few days ago, we needed a some business functionality to validate an IBAN account number. You can use inline Java in your BPEL process but there are more elegant ways as you don’t want to pollute your orchestration layer with business functionality. An nice and elegant way, in my opinion, is the use of the Spring component. By using this component you can expose a Java bean as simple as you would by calling another webservice. This way the business functionality can be bundled in a nice .jar which you can also nicely test separate from the rest. Let’s see how this all works.

First of all, I will need to create a simple jar file which contains the function I want to use with an appriopriate interface. I my case I will create a BankAccountUtils class and IBankAccountUtils interface and a simple JUnit testcase to see if my function does what it has to do.

package nl.redrock.soa.utils;

/**
 * BankAccountUtils interface
 * @author Hugo
 */
public interface IBankAccountUtils {
    
    /**
     * Check an account number
     * @param account the account number to check
     * @return true of a valid IBAN, false if not
     */
    public boolean ibanTest(String account);
}

package nl.redrock.soa.utils;

import java.math.BigInteger;

/**
 * BankAccountUtils class
 * @author Hugo
 */
public class BankAccountUtils implements IBankAccountUtils {

    public final int IBANNUMBER_MIN_SIZE = 15;
    public final int IBANNUMBER_MAX_SIZE = 34;
    public final BigInteger IBANNUMBER_MAGIC_NUMBER = new BigInteger("97");

    @Override
    public boolean ibanTest(String accountNumber) {

        boolean result;

        String newAccountNumber = accountNumber.trim();

        // Check that the total IBAN length is correct as per the country. If not, the IBAN is invalid. We could also check
        // for specific length according to country, but for now we won't
        if (newAccountNumber.length() < IBANNUMBER_MIN_SIZE || newAccountNumber.length() > IBANNUMBER_MAX_SIZE) {
            result = false;
        } else {

            // Move the four initial characters to the end of the string.
            newAccountNumber = newAccountNumber.substring(4) + newAccountNumber.substring(0, 4);

            // Replace each letter in the string with two digits, thereby expanding the string, where A = 10, B = 11, ..., Z = 35.
            StringBuilder numericAccountNumber = new StringBuilder();
            for (int i = 0; i < newAccountNumber.length(); i++) {
                numericAccountNumber.append(Character.getNumericValue(newAccountNumber.charAt(i)));
            }

            // Interpret the string as a decimal integer and compute the remainder of that number on division by 97.
            BigInteger ibanNumber = new BigInteger(numericAccountNumber.toString());
            result = ibanNumber.mod(IBANNUMBER_MAGIC_NUMBER).intValue() == 1;
        }
        return result;
    }
}

import nl.redrock.soa.utils.BankAccountUtils;
import org.junit.Test;
import static org.junit.Assert.*;

/**
 * Simple JUnit test class for the BankAccountUtils
 * @author Hugo
 */
public class BankAccountUtilsTest {
    
   
    @Test
    public void ibanTest(){
        assertTrue(new BankAccountUtils().ibanTest("NL28RBOS0569988888"));
        assertTrue(new BankAccountUtils().ibanTest("PL61109010140000071219812874"));
        assertTrue(new BankAccountUtils().ibanTest("CH3608387000001080173"));
        assertTrue(new BankAccountUtils().ibanTest("IT60X0542811101000000123456"));
        assertTrue(new BankAccountUtils().ibanTest("CY17002001280000001200527600"));
        assertTrue(new BankAccountUtils().ibanTest("FI2112345600000785"));
    }
}

Lets run the tests and see if the functionality works:

Now package the class and interface in a nice .jar and we are done for this bit!

Now lets fire up JDeveloper and create a simple composite. Right click on the Project and choose Project Properties. Go to the Libraries and Classpath tab and add the .jar of the Java project we have created above. You can also just drop the .jar in the SCA-INF/lib folder of your project.

I created a BPEL process which should process a money transfer.

The in- and output look like this:

Now for the interesting part. We want to check if the fromAccount and the toAccount are valid IBAN accounts in the BPEL. First we drag the Spring component onto the composite and name the Spring Context.

A new Spring context file will be created. For all you Java-Spring people....this file will look very familiar in the next couple of steps. Open the Spring xml file and select the Weblogic SCA components.

Now drag the Service component onto the XML file. Give it a name and a target and select the interface from the .jar using the cog. For some documentation see here

Save and close it. When you return to your composite you can see that the Spring component has an interface now.

We do need to make some extra adjustments. We also need to declare the bean which actually holds the implementation so go back and open the context and add the bean and we also need to add an extra interface.java element to the sca:service element to tell it is a Java interface.

Also one thing you will have to do is that you will need to replace the whole spring schema-location with a much simpler version as the one generated or else you will get an error during deployment. Found the solution for this here.

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-sca META-INF/weblogic-sca.xsd">

Now we can wire the BPEL to the Spring component.

You can see it has created a WSDL and a wrapper WSDL in the WSDLs folder. Now you can just call the bean like any other normal partner link.

Don't forget to drop the .jar file also on your server in the /lib directory. The server will need a restart after this to pick up the new .jar file.

Now build and deploy it and call it from the EM test console:

and the result:

And there we go. A nice and simple way to implement business functionality which is re-usable and doesn't clutter your orchestration layer.