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Fault and compensation handling in BPEL processes
A fault is any exceptional condition that can change the normal processing of a BPEL process. A fault can be returned from a service invocation, raised explicitly by the process, or it can be system fault raised by the runtime environment. A well-designed process should consider faults, and handle them whenever possible. Compensation is one way of handling faults.
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State transition diagrams for activities in BPEL processes