Question for the group

[<marchadr@wellsfargo.com>]

Let's take a conceptual example from a case study being developed in SOA Blueprints.

Company Coalogic needs to process orders for their product.

To do this, a sales person uses a client application (Order Desk UI) that is a web application.

1. The sales person enters the order and payment information into the Order Desk UI and submits the request.

[ Transaction start]

2. The Order Desk UI process the request and determines that it needs to invoke a web service within their network to reserve a product taking it out of the inventory count temporarily. The web service is SOAP based with a WS-Profile message structure it also fronts a CICS environment that manages the data. This is after creating the order from invoking an RDMS stored procedure to create the order in the ordering system db running oracle db for example.
3. After reserving the product the Order Desk UI invokes a web service external to the company's network to process the payment information.
	a. If this fails the reservation of the product needs to be removed and the inventory count needs to change
4. After knowing whether or not the payment is successful, the Order Desk UI invokes an rdms stored procedure to update the consumer's order marking it as paid and changing the status to pending shipment. The order desk UI invokes yet another service to get the product in the delivery/logistics system based on MS SQL fronted by a .Net based WS Service.
	a. if this fails an operational notification needs to occur to a support staff to look at the system and the shipping information needs to be put into a pending retry queue.
5. The inventory count is than updated through a call back to the CICS backed web service.
	a. if this fails an operational notification needs to be sent.

[ Transaction end]

Now the company is looking at taking the coordination and transaction of making an order from the Order Desk UI into a web service that will provide this capability to the whole company instead of just the one web application. Currently the Order Desk UI can determine how to roll back because it manages all the data from one message to the other and knows what it initiate.

In this example, what would the benefit be of using the WS-Transaction and where would it end up within the ordering process. Would it be what the new service would be based on?

This is to start adding a practical application to the spec to get an idea of what the direction of the spec should be.
Let me know if you already went through this.

Good to meet some of you at the F2F.

Thanks,

- Dan