WS-BPEL 2.0 Beginner's Guide

Data manipulation and assignments

In this section, we will get familiar with data manipulation and data copying between variables. To copy data between variables, BPEL provides the <assign> activity. Within it, we can perform one or more <copy> commands. For each <copy> command, we have to specify the source (<from>) and the destination (<to>). The following listing presents the syntax of the <assign> activity:

<assign> 
  <copy> 
    <from ... /> 
    <to ... /> 
  </copy> 
  <copy> 
    <from ... /> 
    <to ... /> 
  </copy> 
  ... 
</assign> 

There are several choices for the <from> and <to> clauses. To copy values from one variable to the other, we have to specify the variable attribute in the <from> and <to> elements. The following example shows how to copy the BookstoreAResponse ...