Re: Comments - WSDL 2.0 Message Exchange Patterns

On Jun 16, 2004, at 11:16 AM, Amelia A Lewis wrote:

> I don't think the two of us can necessarily solve this.  The problem:
> "fault generation" may clash with the same term used, with differing
> meaning, in the SOAP specification.  Is that a correct statement?

Yes.

> In which case we may need a different term, if this potential clash is 
> seen
> as confusing (because it looks like the same concept but is different).
> Is it really true that "fault generation" in SOAP means something
> different?

In SOAP, "generate" means that software instantiates a fault, but it 
says nothing about it getting serialised on the wire; it is very 
purposefully vague, so that faults don't have to get propagated.

 From the Primer [1]:

[[[
SOAP makes a distinction between generating a fault and ensuring that 
the fault is returned to the originator of the message or to another 
appropriate node which can benefit from this information. However, 
whether a generated fault can be propagated appropriately depends on 
the underlying protocol binding chosen for the SOAP message message 
exchange. The specification does not define what happens if faults are 
generated during the propagation of one-way messages. The only 
normative underlying protocol binding, which is the SOAP HTTP binding, 
offers the HTTP response as a means for reporting a fault in the 
incoming SOAP message. (See Section 4 for more details on SOAP protocol 
bindings.)
]]]

Thinking about it, "Fault Propagation" or "Fault Reporting" might be 
more appropriate than the other suggestions.

Cheers,


1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-soap12-part0-20030624/#L3031

--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems

Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2004 14:40:12 UTC