WS-RMD issue: precedence of RMD location

[Daniel Jemiolo <danjemiolo@us.ibm.com>]

During the last TC call, Dave S. brought
up the fact that WS-RMD has two ways of specifying the location of the
resource's RMD but no order of precedence for reading/verifying them. What
follows is a proposed resolution:

0. If a resource has an RMD, it must
have the location specified in a resource property and the WSDL portType
attribute. Today, the property is optional.

1. The property value must be an absolute
URI. It should be easy to generate this value at runtime, when the final
deployment info of the resource is known. The value provided in the WSDL
attribute may be a relative path, and this may not resolve for remote clients
(but may be useful during design time).

Note: Relative paths may not
resolve because many SOAP engines use virtual paths to distinguish between
different web services. A client that discovers the WSDL through ?wsdl
query or WS-MetadataExchange would not know how to map the relative path
against the URL of the service.

2. Simplify the data type of the WSDL
portType/@metadataDescriptorLocation attribute from "list of pair
of URIs" to "xsd:anyURI" so that there is one descriptor
per portType.


Thoughts?



Dan Jemiolo
IBM Corporation
Research Triangle Park, NC


+++ I'm an engineer. I make slides that people can't read. Sometimes I
eat donuts. +++