SOA Suite provides a central store for shared artifacts that can be accessed at design time from JDeveloper and at run time from deployed SOA composite applications. This central store, the MDS repository, along with the Metadata Services on top of it, helps to organize reuse of cross-application artifacts such as canonical data model definitions, SOA composite templates and business event definitions. Note that the MDS repository is an intrinsic part of the SOA Suite run-time environment, not something that you need to install separately and additionally. However, also note that during development, the JDeveloper IDE can make use of a local, file system–based MDS repository.
Service Bus does not interact with MDS – neither at runtime nor at design time, except for the ability to import objects from and export objects to the design time MDS. Working with common, shared artifacts in Service Bus projects is typically done using a single, generic, shared project that holds these artifacts.
Supporting Resources
The sources for the final situation for this section are found in the folders under ch21.
Blog articles by Lucas Jellema:
- SOA Suite 12c: Sharing resources between SOA composites and Service Bus projects with Design Time MDS
- SOA Suite 12c: Inspect and Leverage the contents of the Run Time MDS in the Integrated WLS
- SOA Suite 12c: Deploying shared artifacts to Run Time MDS – the official approach and the quick short-cut
MDS Explorer – project on java.net (Shows how to get full access to a MDS (Meta Data Services) repository. File or DB Based)
Jennie DeRosa on the Avio blog – XSLT and DVMs – Design Time Execution in Oracle Service Bus 12c
