Issue 088 - WS-BA: 'presume nothing' assumption is contradicted

This is identified as WS-TX issue 088.

Please ensure follow-ups have a subject line starting "Issue 088 – WS-BA: 'presume nothing' assumption is contradicted".

From: Ram Jeyaraman [mailto:Ram.Jeyaraman@microsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 10:44 PM
To: ws-tx@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [ws-tx] NEW Issue - WS-BA: 'presume nothing' assumption is contradicted

Protocol: WS-BA

Artifact: spec

Draft: BA specification CD 02

Link to the document referenced:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/18818/wstx-wsba-1.1-spec-cd-02.pdf

Section and PDF line number: lines 233-242

Issue type: design

Related issues:

Issue Description:

The specification states that: All state transitions are reliably recorded, including application state and coordination metadata.

However, the description of GetStatus message states: “If the participant has failed and forgotten the activity the Status response will be wsba:Ended, which must be treated by the coordinator as a failure condition.”

The fact that a participant may forget an activity due to a failure would appear to contradict the assumption that all transitions are reliably recorded, which violates the ‘presume nothing’ assumption of the protocol.

Proposed solution:

Reword the description of GetStatus message from:

“If the participant has failed and forgotten the activity the Status response will be wsba:Ended, which must be treated by the coordinator as a failure condition.”

To:

“If the participant has forgotten the activity, the Status response MUST be wsba:Ended.”

Further, line 234 (description of GetStatus) states:

“In response the coordinator or participant returns a Status message containing a QName indicating which row of the state table [Appendix A: State Tables for the Agreement Protocols] the coordinator or participant is currently in.”

The word ‘row’ should be changed to ‘column’ in the above text.

ws-tx message