RE: [ebxml-bp] Document Envelope

["Yunker, John" <yunker@amazon.com>]

The discussion didn't revolve around these attributes, instead it was the "isPositiveResponse" and "businessDocument" attributes.  In one example cited inside the BPSS 1.1 the "isPositiveResponse" is linked to the "businessDocument" as a way to control behavior ("acceptOrder" business Document and "rejectOrder" businessDocument map to "true" and "false" respectively)

However most of the order document exchanges I am involved in have the "orderRequest" followed by the "orderResponse", and the order response can have success, failure, and partial success as a result.  The orderRequest and orderResponse constitute the transaction that results in the commitment.

JJ, I agree that the attributes you list are the key metadata provided by the "b2b messaging infrastructure".  

We cannot be as simplistic about the "isPositiveResponse" being the key driver of choreography, because that requires simplifying business requests to an "all or nothing" result.  I am VERY nervous about assigning business success / failure to the envelope.  While this greatly simplifies implementation, it is simply moving the complexity around, instead of meeting it head on and working through the proper mechanisms for communicating the context driving business execution.

We should provide a mechanism for a transition to reference a business contextual value other than the envelope.  I have long argued for an expression on transition guards, startsWhen, and endsWhen.  That expression should have "syntax" and "expression" atttributes, so the appropriate syntax for the expression may be used.  One of those syntax could be "CAM", but in any case the result would be either "true" or "false" and the transition, startsWhen, and endsWhen would use that result.  Otherwise the sender of the message not only always has control of the process, they also MUST have access to all information.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean-Jacques Dubray [mailto:jeanjadu@Attachmate.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 9:37 AM
To: David RR Webber; Monica J. Martin; ebXML BP
Subject: [ebxml-bp] Document Envelope


I must admit that I did not follow too well the arguments about document envelope in the call today.

For me Document Envelope has a series of attributes 

isPositiveResponse 	: maps easily to web service operations
isAuthenticated  		: maps easily to WS-Security
isConfidential  		: requires encryption
isTamperDetectable  	: requires digital signature

All these attributes can be mapped easily to existing WS technologies. 

So I can easily define a binding for these attributes if this document envelope were to be exchanged in the context of an operation activity, but I don't have to change their meaning like I would need to do to map an operation to a business transaction. This actually illustrates my point is that we can make the ebXML and WS stacks co-exist, but I don't think we are ready to merge them until ebXML layers itself on top of/with the WS stack.

Am I missing something?

JJ-