Sending attachment using Email Activity in BPEL 11g

Sending an attachment using Email Activity (in SOA 11.1.1.5) is an easy task. All you have to do is drag and drop an email activity and double click on it. Assign the following parameters and the attachment will be sent along with the email.

Name- Name of the attachment as it should appear

MimeType- This MimeType is for attachment. Choose appropriate MimeType from here.

Value - Write what you would like to see in the attachment. Simply hard coding.

Well, sometimes the requirement may be to send some custom data, may be you fetched some data at runtime from the DB and would lke to send it as attachment. This isn't complex either, all you have to do is modify the ContentBody parameter as follows. You can do this successfully from the EmailParamsAssign Activity but don't forget to verify the same in the bpel source too.

Extending this a bit further, if you'd like to send some files (image,pdf,doc,xls,csv) that are already stored at some server location or you may have written them from your process, follow these  steps.

1.) Set the appropriate MimeType for the file.

2.) Add the following line in the .bpel source under appropriate BodyPart.

3.) Add another copy operation in the bpel source to assign string('base64') to ContentEncoding in BodyPart[2].

4.) Modify the  ContentBody  parameter to read the file at runtime using ora:readFile() function as follows.

Key Points to Note:

• The file location and name in ora:readFile() above are case-sensitive.
• Specifying the correct MimeType is very important. If the MimeType is incorrect, either the mail won't go or you may get encrypted characters in the attached file.
• file:/// (three slashes mean absolute path and two slashes mean relative path)

The above solution works with all the files. Should anyone need the working project, I can mail the same. 

Inserting a New Line character in message using BPEL XSLT

In a requirement, we were trying to format the data fetched from DB (in XML format in BPEL) into a String variable with a new line inserted after each record. So that the data below would appear in the String variable like Following is the simple transformation to achieve the same.

<xsl:for-each select="/ns0:SelectFromLookupOutputCollection/ns0:SelectFromLookupOutput">
<xsl:value-of select='concat(ns0:property_name, ",", ns0:property_value,"&#10;")'/>
</xsl:for-each>

Key Points to Note:

• The magic lies in the word &#10; which serves as a new line character in XSLT (11g). In above case, it gets appended at the end of each record resulting in new line at the end of each record.
• The function somehow doesn't work in SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 (BUG-13602524, thanks to my colleague Nivea for identifying this) but works in 11.1.1.4 and older versions.

How to pass JNDI name dynamically to an Adapter

Recently, I've been trying configure an MQ adapter that could enqueue data of any structure into specified queue based on the specified JNDI, all passed dynamically at runtime. This post decsribes how you can pass the JNDI Name dynamically to an Adapter.

All you have to do is define a String variable (say myJndiName) that stores your JNDI name (eis/MQ/someThing...already configured on Weblogic) and pass this variable into Invoke Activity properties directly in the .bpel source.   

Note that you'll not be able to find this property in the Invoke Activity > Properties tab.

And that's it. You can assign different values on the fly to the variable myJndiName and same adapter can enqueue in different JNDI locations. It also works for FTP and JMS adapters too.