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Support for null business objects

This scenario involves an outside system communicating with IBM BPM through XML wrapped inside of a SOAP message. When the enclosed element is nillible and has xsi:nil="true", then the resulting DataObject which is created in IBM BPM is null.

Here is an example which illustrates an XML message with a nillible element.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope">
	<soap:Body>
		<p:Employee xmlns:p="http://www.mycompany.com" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org" 
			xsi:nil="true"/>
	</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Where Employee is defined as:

<element name="Employee" nillable="true">
...
</element>

The business object that is generated and sent from the export is null in this case.

For example, if any downstream components have operations invoked on them, the input to that operation is null.

These objects cannot be passed into business object maps because business object maps are unable to map fields from a null object.

Programming techniques