Exception Handling Within Workflow-Based Web Applications

Marco Brambilla, Nicola D'Elia

Abstract: As the Web becomes a platform for implementing B2B applications, the need arises of extending Web conceptual modeling from data-centric applications to data- and process-centric applications. New primitives must be put in place to implement workflows describing business processes. In this context, new problems about process safety arise, due to the loose control on Web clients. Indeed, user behavior can generate dangerous incoherencies for the execution of processes. This paper presents a proposal of workflow-enabling primitives for Web applications, and a high level approach to the management of exceptions that occurs during execution of processes. We present a classification of exceptions that can occur inside workflow-based Web applications, and recovery policies to retrieve coherent status and data after an exception. An implementation experience is briefly presented too.