BPEL - False Error

The other day I had to design a BPEL process to interface data into Oracle eBusiness Suite. I built the validation logic via a PL/SQL procedure and expected to use Oracle Applications adapter to call it from the BPEL process. Everything went fine except the output variable from the invocation process did not seem to be populated.

Using the transformation node I dragged the return parameter to a local variable which produced the following code:

<ns1:result> <xsl:value-of select=”/db:OutputParameters/db:X_RETURN_STATUS”/> </ns1:result>

and it did not work. I verified the output variable and it did have the data populated. To my dismay, the namespace for X_RETURN_STATUS note was reset to “”. This was the reason why the generated code did not work. The obvious fix was

<ns1:result> <xsl:value-of select=”/db:OutputParameters/X_RETURN_STATUS”/> </ns1:result>

which caused, however, an error in the XSL transformation since “db” schema did not assume a namespace’less node. Maybe this is a bug in Oracle BPEL 10.3.1.0 engine, but this was the solution.