How to traverse a list of ints in a BPEL process

Question

I am building a BPEL process in Netbeans 6.8 and I invoke a Web Service that returns a list of ints.

<xs:complexType name="getHotelsResponse">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="return" type="xs:int" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"></xs:element>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>

I want (if possible - not sure anymore...) to iterate through all those ints and invoke a different Web Service for each one of them.

I tried using a ForEach activity, but I can't figure out the usage for my case. It requires a Start Value and an End Value (if I could somehow get how many ints I got back) but even then inside the ForEach activity if say I put an Assign activity how do I get the current element of the list in each loop?

Answer 1

I used following BPEL snippet to concat the content of a list in to a comma separated string. You can use the same code with an invoke to call external service.

<bpel:forEach parallel="no" counterName="Counter" name="ForEach">
        <bpel:startCounterValue>
            <![CDATA[1]]>
        </bpel:startCounterValue>
        <bpel:finalCounterValue><![CDATA[count($input.payload/tns:return)]]></bpel:finalCounterValue>
        <bpel:scope>
            <bpel:assign validate="no" name="AppendItem">
                <bpel:copy>
                    <bpel:from>

                        <![CDATA[concat($Response, $input.payload/tns:return[round($Counter)], ", ")]]>
                    </bpel:from>
                    <bpel:to variable="Response"></bpel:to>
                </bpel:copy>
            </bpel:assign>
        </bpel:scope>
    </bpel:forEach>

You can get the count of elements from the following XPath

count($input.payload/tns:return)

You can access value of the i th element using the following XPath

$input.payload/tns:return[round($Counter)]

You may get rid of the round() function, but I had to use to get rid of an issue in Apache ODE.