I’m not sure exactly why WebLogic Workshop bothers to make things customisable

It just makes things break!!

(Followup at end)

I’m mucking around with the workflow side now, and I spent a very good hour with the customer rep modelling the business workflow that we are going to implement. After the customer leaves, I start making improvements to the design by extracting common pieces to a sub-process, and so. Then, all of a sudden, it doesn’t want to build anymore.

So… here’s a simple, five step way to break your process project.

• Create a new Process Project.
• Add a Client Request control to the project.
• Add a Client Response control to the project.
• Open the client Request Control. Change the method name to ‘invoke’ (instead of ‘clientRequest’).
• Attempt to build the project.

ERROR: DESCRIPTION: An unexpected exception occurred while attempting to generate the Enterprise Java Beans or JMS Message Queues required for this Web Service. Error: com.bea.wlw.runtime.core.dispatcher.DispCache$CacheException:Unable to generate beans. See workshop.log for details
SUGGESTION: An unexpected error occurred. Please contact support@bea.com for further assistance.

Umm. Yes. I can see why they put in a way to change the method that doesn’t work. What I can’t see is why changing the method name causes things to break.

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Followup: I must have my bug attracting deodorant on today. Further exploration has demonstrated that it was my choice of method name that causes it to fail. If I use ‘foobar’ instead of ‘invoke’ at step 4, then it works.

This makes it a lot easier to understand why this bug slipped through; edge case scenario and all that. Still, that doesn’t explain why it breaks, nor does it excuse the wonderfully useless error message.