We have already seen this problem where the requirement is to take an already existing service and allow asynchronous calls against request-response operations (actually, we already did async in a proprietary config-file type way and now want to use WS-Addressing to achieve the same thing with old WSDLs).

I would agree with Katy that defaulting the input wsa:Action to the SOAPAction if present would solve this problem. The output and fault actions could keep their current defaults (I assume it is only the input wsa:Action that has to match SOAPAction).

Pete


Katy Warr wrote:

What is the correct behaviour for gen'ing wsa:Action in the client when the HTTP 1.1 SOAPAction is set ( i.e. not "") and there is no wsaw:Action explicitly specified in the WSDL?  

The problem is that, the default action pattern for wsa:Action cannot be gauranteed to generate a wsa:action to match SOAPAction.

Here is an example to illustrate:

<binding name="StockQuoteSoapBinding" type="tns:StockQuotePortType">
  <soap:binding style="document" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http" />
  <wsaw:UsingAddressing wsdl:required="true" />
  <operation name="GetLastTradePrice">
    <soap:operation soapAction="http://example.com/GetLastTradePrice" />
    <input>
      <soap:body use="literal" />
    </input>
    <output>
      <soap:body use="literal" />
    </output>
  </operation>
</binding>

If we use the default action pattern to generate the wsa:Action, this is the result for the input operation
http://example.com/StockQuotePortType/GetLastTradePriceInput
As this is not  the same as the SOAPAction, this will cause non-compliance.  The WSDL in this case is implicitly inconsistent with the wsa spec - a problem which will occur in every existing WSDL 1.1 in which the values of SOAPAction have not been constructed according to the default action pattern.

A possible solution is to set the wsa:Action header to SOAPAction (if SOAPAction =! "") in preference to using the default action pattern (if the wsa:Action is not specified explicitly).

This would means a change something like this in the wsdl spec:

4.3 Default Action  Pattern for WSDL 1.1
In the absence of the wsa:Action attribute....
==>When using the SOAP 1.1 HTTP binding, if the SOAPAction is set, the action for inputs and outputs MUST be the same as this and the default action pattern is not used. <==