Presence of an wsa:relatesTo part within an acknowledgement message

[Chamikara Jayalath <chamikara@wso2.com>]

Hi All,

I have a question regarding the relationship between an sequence
acknowledgement message and the corresponding request message. I think I
missed a part of the discussion that happened through this list. Pardon
me if this issue was discussed previously.

The problem is weather an wsa:RelatesTo tag should be present in an
acknowledgement message. The presence of an wsa:RelatesTo part will make
implementation issues such as dispatching easy. I.e. an web service
framework will be able to identify the relationship between an ack
message and the original application message that asked for this and it
will be able to easily relate them (without going to the RM level).

But to my knowledge,having a wsa:relatesTo value without the
wsa:relationshipType attribute imply that the second message is an
'reply'. But an acknowledment is not an application level reply to the
original message and it might be better to have an different value for
the wsa:relationshipType attribute.

On the other hand somebody could argue that the wsa:relatesTo header
should not be present in an ack message since it is an RM control
message and since it may have no direct connection with the original
application message (even though it trigured the RM destination to send
this ack).

What should be the convention ?

Thank you,
Chamikara