Answers to a set of frequently asked questions about administering BPEL processes.
Applications that contain BPEL processes as part of a process application should be started, stopped, deployed, and undeployed using Process Center. Certain life-cycle operations, such as starting and stopping templates are not available in Process Center. You must perform these operations using either the administrative console or the administrative scripts.
Applications that contain BPEL processes cannot be stopped or undeployed if instances of BPEL process or human task templates in any state are present. This restriction does not apply if the process server is running in development mode or the process application is running on a Process Center server.
When development mode is enabled on a stand-alone process server, you can stop and uninstall business process applications even when the application contains running instances of BPEL processes or human tasks. In a production system, making sure that development mode is not enabled can protect your long-running instances from being accidentally stopped or uninstalled.
If a currently valid process template is in the started state, but the application is in the stopped state, no new process instances are created from the template. Existing process instances cannot be navigated while the application is in the stopped state.
Using the administrative console, select a process template, and click Stop. This action puts the process template into the stopped state, and no more instances are created from the template. After the template stops, any attempts to create a process instance from the template result in an EngineProcessModelStoppedException error.
If a process template is no longer valid, this fact has no effect on running instances that were instantiated from the template. Existing process instances continue to run to completion. Old and new instances run in parallel until all of the old instances have finished, or until they have been terminated.
Changing the state of a process template to 'stopped' only stops new instances being created. Existing process instances continue running until completion in an orderly way.
Log on to the Business Process Choreographer Explorer as a process administrator, and go to the Process Instances Administered By Me page. This page displays any running process instances. If necessary, you can terminate and delete these process instances.
For a process instance to run, its corresponding application must also be running. If the application is stopped, the navigation of the process instance cannot continue. For this reason, you can only stop an enterprise application if it has no BPEL process instances.