RE: Use of FaultTo when propagating WS-A Faults

"It seems particularly wrong simply to drop such a message on the floor
because it happened to lack an [action]."

 

It only seems wrong because you don't believe action should be
mandatory.  It is right to drop a message on the floor (in the absence
of any trustworthy fallback way to return the fault) when it's so badly
malformed according to the spec.

 

________________________________

From: public-ws-addressing-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-ws-addressing-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Hull
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 11:28 AM
To: David Orchard
Cc: public-ws-addressing@w3.org
Subject: Re: Use of FaultTo when propagating WS-A Faults

 

What if we really are in a one-way scenario and "anonymous" is
undefined?  It seems wrong not to try to send a fault to the [fault
endpoint] if it exists.  It seems particularly wrong simply to drop such
a message on the floor because it happened to lack an [action].

David Orchard wrote: 

Related to LC76, we came to the agreement that ReplyTo would NOT be used
when a message contains an imperfect set of WS-A Headers, like a missing
WS-A: Action.

 

What about the use of FaultTo for a Fault?  Imagine the scenario where
FaultTo is non-anonymous and Action is missing.  The receiver decides to
Fault (perhaps because mU was on a WS-A header).  

 

I think the correct behaviour is that the FaultTo should not be used for
propagating the Fault, because the FaultTo is part of the overall WS-A
set of headers which aren't valid.  But that does seem a little
counter-intuitive.

 

If the FaultTo is ignored, then Fault would probably be sent back over
an HTTP Connection if one exists.  This is like changing the faultTo to
become anonymous.  This seems to be yet another scenario where even
though the sender believes it is a one-way message, it will allow for a
soap fault in the response if it wants as much information as possible.

 

Cheers,

Dave