ORABPEL-10555 Identity Service Configuration error

Got this error when trying to assign a user a task in Oracle SOA Suite 11g’s “Human Task” component. When you open up the task and goto the “Assignment” section, open up the “Identity Lookup” wizard and connect to your local application server connection- it should populate the security “Realm” (For example: jazn for the default Realm) …and it should let you select from the list of Users configured in Weblogic.

Pic1: Configure new users in weblogic’s default realm

However, if it does not show you the above and instead gives you an “Sever exception is: Connection refused from server” when you click on the icon titled “Lookup” (little magnifying glass over a page icon) …then you might be getting the following exceptions (see below) in your logs (I managed to catch the stack trace in another screen trying to do the same sort of work – i.e. connect to the appserver and get users from it).

Pic2: Error when connecting to application server for users from JDeveloper

I looked around forums and could not find a clear explanation. Did I need to configure something to get my JDeveloper instance to talk to my standalone SOA Admin Server to get the users in it? Was there some development required (See “Creating a Custom Identity Service Plugin” for creating custom plugins for BPM Suite. Note: You will need the BPM Jars in 11g under “$ORACLE_HOME/soa/modules/oracle.soa.workflow_11.1.1/bpm-services.jar”)….

…turns out that inorder to get to the users the Task developer component needed to talk to the Managed SOA Weblogic Server instance and not the Admin Server instance. All this while my SOA server instance was down and I did not think much of it – why would I need SOA server for getting at Weblogic Security Configuration? Admin Server should be enough? Right? Does not quite work that way.
Exceptions:

ORABPEL-10555
Identity Service Configuration error.
Identity Service Configuration has error.
Please refer to the identity service configuration guidlines and correct the Identity Service configurations. Contact oracle support if error is not fixable.
        at oracle.bpel.services.identity.client.AbstractIdentityConfigServiceClient.getConfiguredApplications(AbstractIdentityConfigServiceClient.java:152)
	at oracle.tip.tools.ide.common.services.connections.ConnectionsUtil.searchApplications(ConnectionsUtil.java:236)

Solution: You need to have your standalone SOA Server and Admin server running to be able to use custom users defined in Weblogic in your SOA application