RE: [ws-caf] Fault message formats

["Furniss, Peter" <Peter.Furniss@choreology.com>]

Bryan,

Another datum for you: OASIS BTP's soap/http mapping does not use SOAP
Fault, sending its own message. (it maps a received SOAP Fault to its
own FAULT/communication-problem, since the SOAP fault is "lower-layer"
to it). We pondered changing this in the new alternative "web-service
friendly" binding, which is intended to require what is easy for
web-service implementations rather what is permitted by the web-service
specifications (and be BP 1.0 compliant), but concluded there wasn't an
obvious need to change.

Peter

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Murray, Bryan P. [mailto:bryan.murray@hp.com] 
> Sent: 20 May 2004 00:04
> To: Mark Little; ws-caf@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: RE: [ws-caf] Fault message formats
> 
> 
> Since the TC members are clearly opposed to using the SOAP 
> Fault element to convey fault information related to 
> WS-Context messages, I will refrain from further comments on 
> the subject. However, I thought the group might be interested 
> in the results of a very unscientific and incomplete research 
> to see how some other specifications handle faults.
> 
> I divided specs into 3 categories. First there were specs 
> that either did not directly define messages or did not 
> specify a WSDL document. BPEL and WSFL fall into this 
> category, although the text and examples in WSFL imply that 
> SOAP Faults are intended to be used with the lifetime 
> operations that are defined.
> 
> The next category is for specs that explicitly do not use the 
> SOAP Fault element. In my quick review I only ran across 
> WS-Reliability for this category. This spec does require the 
> use of the SOAP Fault element in request-response exchanges, 
> but does not put any information in the Fault element, using 
> a SOAP Header element instead.
> 
> The last category is for specs which use the wsdl:fault 
> element and have text implying the use of the SOAP Fault 
> element. In this category are WS-MetaDataExchange, 
> WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Coordination. WS-Coordination is 
> underspecified in the area of faults, but the following 
> statement from the introduction to the section titled 
> "Coordination Faults" is a pretty strong indication of the 
> intent: "For example, when used with SOAP 1.2 the identifier 
> code is the fault sub-code and any additional information is 
> passed in the detail." I think an earlier version of 
> WS-Coordination did define their own fault messages.
> 
> I also looked at ebXML Messaging. Although that spec talks 
> about using SOAP Faults when the severity is error but not 
> when it is warning, I think it is more like WS-Reliability 
> uses them. It is not very clear in the spec.
> 
> I did not include specs which build on those listed above 
> such as WS-AtomicTransaction, or other ebXML specs. I also 
> did not include the specs this TC is writing or some more 
> contentious specs such as WSRF.
> 
> This review did not produce any clear direction although it 
> seems that more recently written specs have a stronger 
> tendency to use the SOAP Fault element to convey error 
> information then older specs did.
> 
> Bryan
>