[Quick Tip] BPEL Correlation, Load tests in soapUI and Groovy

In WS-BPEL, the concept of Correlation is used to maintain references to instantiated business process instances with the help of business-application-specific data (like social security numbers, Order IDs) in the exchanged messages. When you're testing these BPEL processes with asynchronous service invocations you might have come across the problem of maintaining a unique correlation value across the multiple test steps of a BPEL process (because the back-end services this asynchronous service calls made to, are not available in the test environment). Here's a quick tip to achieve this via a Groovy script in soapUI. In the beginning of your test case have a Groovy script test step which does the following: It creates a random integer value and assigns it to a property. So you can make use of this property in the SOAP request where the correlation set is initialized, and all the other SOAP request test steps which uses the same correlation set, as follows: