WS-BaseFault & Java

[Samuel Meder <meder@mcs.anl.gov>]

We've been struggling a little with how to present a Java exception
stack trace to clients:

      * The ErrorCode field seems very much geared towards presenting
        legacy error codes and has a maxOccurs of 1 so we would not be
        able to communicate the stack trace and the error code if the
        stack trace were caused by a error in a legacy call
      * The Description field should contain a plain language
        description of the fault. Again, not exactly a perfect fit.

The solution we see is to either rename ErrorCode to something more
generic, say ErrorDetails, and change maxOccurs to unbounded or to allow
the annotation of the Description field with something indicating it's
content (we may only want to present certain type of content to the user
at the default setting). 

In general I feel that both the ErrorCode and Description elements
should have been declared allowing for attribute extensibility as you
can't (afaik, please correct me if I am wrong, I'm not a schema expert)
add attributes to these elements via schema extension. 

/Sam

-- 
Sam Meder <meder@mcs.anl.gov>
The Globus Alliance - University of Chicago
630-252-1752