error handling of dangling references in encoding

All,

I took an AI in last weeks call to start an email
discussion regarding the handling of potential
"dangling references" in a SOAP encoding graph.

(Sorry for the delay, thought I had sent this last week but
found it in my drafts!)

On the call, we essentially had two points of view;
	- one in which the recipient MUST return a SOAP Fault
	if the encoded graph contained references (IDREF) to
	non-existant nodes,
	- the other that the recipient MAY return a SOAP
	Fault if there were dangling references in the
	encoded graph.

On the call, I had suggested that use of the RFC2119
SHOULD qualifier might be used in our spec. This would
provide guidance to implementers that leaned towards
MUST, but at the same time did not impose a hard requirement
on the receiving node.

As I understood from the discussion on the call, imposing
a requirement to return a SOAP Fault might be problematic
in cases where there might be good reason not to have to
parse the entire message to determine if there were dangling
references.

There has been some discussion on this topic in this
thread[1] on xml-dist-app. However, let's use this thread
so that we can track this particular aspect separately.

So, fire away!

Cheers,

Chris
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2002Jan/0334.html

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2002 11:00:34 UTC