Re: SOAPAction Proposal

I'm going to attempt to regurgitate some of the conversation we had
after the call, despite the fact that I haven't slept between then
and now... ;)


One of the comments that has come up re: SOAPAction and SOAP services
in general is that making multiple methods/services available on the
same URI (e.g., depositMoney, withdrawMoney on
http://www.bank.com/service) is fundamentally at odds with the Web
architecture, because all services/resources available on the Web
(including Web Services) should be able to be identified by a
(singular) URI.

Therefore, an alternate proposal would be to drop SOAPAction and
require that methods/services have distinct service URIs.

Personally, I think there is still value in separating the service
location (transport URL) from the service identity, until we live in
a URN-resolvable world (not holding my breath just yet, tho some of
the recent work is interesting). However, I do think this might make
sense, generally; while SOAPAction might still have value, the
argument above still may be valid, and the right thing might be to
require a 1-to-1 relationship.



On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 05:06:55PM +0800, Martin Gudgin wrote:
> 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
> 
> [1] http://www.soaprpc.com/mirror/ietf/draft-box-http-soap-01.txt.html
> 

-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2001 14:56:21 UTC