Anything that hampers the normal flow of execution of a BPMN process is termed as an exception. Exceptions happen due to undesirable situations such as the system may be down, a business condition is not satisfied, a deadline has expired, and so on. These undesirable situations result in an exception. To lay down the foundation for an effective exception-handling mechanism, we need to classify exceptions. Along with the classification of exceptions, it's equally important to know how exceptions propagate. Once an exception propagation mechanism is defined, we can implement exception handling based on Exception Handling Patterns discussed in this chapter. A distinct approach is used in this chapter to define Exception Handling Patterns. This chapter deals with Exception Handling Patterns only for the Oracle BPM suite and hence the terms and terminologies will revolve around this product suite.

It's always a good process-modeling practice to analyze, define...