SOAPAction Proposal

Hello,

Would this be meaningful enough? I'm thinking of the case in which 
the body contains multi-ref elements. The first child element might 
be merely a multi-ref, whose identity bears no real significance as 
to the message intent. Don't you want something whose 
calculation yields a less variable result from message to message?

How about using the name of the first serialization root found within the
body?

Based on my experience in SOAP implementation, I still think that 
any SOAPAction value is best left as arbitrarily defined... making it
something generated from the message contents opens up a real can of
worms.

RC

I've been reading the mails on SOAPAction, there seems to be some
sentiment for the idea that the value of SOAPAction should reflect some
information in the body of the message. Here is a proposal for discussion;

The value of SOAPAction *must* be the namespace URI and local name of the
first element child of soap:Body separated by a #. If the value of
SOAPAction does not contain that value the server *must* generate a fault.

e.g.

POST someuri HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml
Content-Length: nnnn
SOAPAction: myuri#myelement

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap='uri for soap' >
  <soap:Body>
    <m:myelement xmlns:m='myuri' />
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Note that currently SOAPAction can be anything, it doesn't need to reflect
any piece of information in the body of the message. This proposal is
similar ( if not identical... ) to the SOAPMethodName in SOAP 1.0[1]

Flames, comments etc. to the usual address,

Martin Gudgin
DevelopMentor

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2001 11:19:46 UTC