Modication to Nick's Fault Handling Proposal

This email outlines a modification to Nick's original fault handling proposal, to enable fault messages to be received without triggering an exception.

The original proposal is at: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-chor/2004Oct/0026.html

Following the description of the new interaction syntax, there are a set of rules associated with the exchange part. The third rule states:

"When multiple respond message exchanges are specified, one respond
message MUST be of normal informationType and all the others MUST be of exception
informationType. There is an implicit choice between the respond exchanges"

This rule declares that all but one of the exchanges must refer to an exception information type - which when populated, would automatically cause an exception to be thrown (according to the rules associated with an exception information type).

Therefore, to minimise the changes to this proposal, I would suggest that we drop this rule, to enable more than one of the respond exchanges to be associated with information types. This means that in the case of a fault, the fault type would be declared as an information type without the 'exceptionType="true"'' - and therefore it would be treated as a normal information type.

It may be a requirement to add a new rule which states that "the first 'respond' exchange MUST relate to the normal message response, with any subsequent 'respond' exchange being associated with a fault". Alternatively, the action field could be changed to 'fault' for any non-normal response.

Regards
Gary