Issue 6 (Message Property Optionality)

Description:

 From the issues list: "In some situations, information is required,  
when it could be optional; e.g., the To address that's also in the  
transport binding. Could it be made optional ?"

Target:

Core, SOAP Binding

Justification:

The specification currently mandates the serialization of some message  
addressing properties as SOAP headers in messages when they could be  
omitted without loss of information or is less than clear about their  
optionality:

(i) Anonymous address:  
<wsa:To>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing/role/ 
anonymous</wsa:To>
(ii) <wsa:ReplyTo> - optional, "MUST be present if a reply is  
expected", "If the [reply endpoint] is absent, the contents of the  
[source endpoint] may be used to formulate a message to the source."  
I.e. it must be present, but if not use <wsa:From> instead.
(iii) <wsa:From> - optional, can be used to provide a default for  
ReplyTo and FaultTo.
(iv) <was:Action> is already being discussed elsewhere.

Proposal:

(i) Omission of a <wsa:To> header block is semantically equivalent to  
its inclusion with a value of  
"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing/role/anonymous", a  
role of ultimate recipient (or maybe next depending on outcome of issue  
7) and mustUnderstand="true" .

(ii), (iii) <wsa:From> required if a reply is expected, <wsa:ReplyTo>  
only required if a reply is to be sent to an endpoint other than the  
one in <wsa:From>.

Marc.

---
Marc Hadley <marc.hadley at sun.com>
Web Technologies and Standards, Sun Microsystems.

Received on Monday, 8 November 2004 17:46:32 UTC