Updating an EPR

The question recently came back on the WS-Addressing mailing list of whether Reference Parameters can/should be used as the SOAP equivalent of cookies. Something more along the lines of session management than addressing. See Peter Hendry’s email for a clear description of his use case. The use case is reasonable but I don’t think this is what WS-Addressing is really for as I explain in bullet #3 of this post. What interested me more was the response that came from Conor Cahill and his statement that AOL is implementing an “EndpointReferenceUpdate” element that can be returned in the response to tell the sender to update the EPR. I am not fond of this as a mechanism for session management, but I can see one important benefit of this mechanism: getting hold of a “good” EPR for more efficient addressing. Here is an example application:

Imagine a Web services that represents the management interface of a business process engine. That Web service provides access to all the currently running business process instances in the engine (think Service Group if you’re into WSRF). Imagine that this Web service supports a SOAP header called “target” and that header is defined to contain an XPath statement. When receiving a message containing a “target” header, the Web service will look for the (for the sake of simplicity let’s assume there can only be one) business process instance for which this XPath statement returns “true” when evaluated on the XML representation of the state of the business process instance. And the Web service will then interpret the message to be targeted at that business process instance. This is somewhat similar to WS-Management’s “SelectorSet”. A sender can use this mechanism to address a specific business process instance based on the characteristics of that instance (side note: whether the sender understands and builds this header itself or whether it gets it as a Reference Parameter from an EPR is orthogonal). But this can be a very expensive dispatching mechanism. The basic implementation would require the Web service to evaluate an XPath statement on each and every business process instance state document. Far from optimal. This is where Conor’s “EndpointReferenceUpdate” can come in handy. After doing once the XPath evaluation work of finding out which business process instance the sender wants to address, the Web service can return a more optimized EPR to be used to address that instance, one that is a lot easier to dispatch on. This kind of scenario is a lot more relevant in my perspective to the work of the WS-Addressing working group than the session example.

An important consequence of a mechanism such as “EndpointReferenceUpdate” is that it makes it critical that the Web service be able to tell which SOAP headers are in the message as a result of being in the EPR used by the sender and which ones were added by the sender on purpose. For example, if a SOAP message comes in with headers “a”, “b” and “c” and the Web service assumes that “a” and “b” were in the EPR and “c” was added by the invoker, then the new EPR returned as part of “EndpointReferenceUpdate” will only be a replacement for “a” and “b” and the Web service will still expect “c” to be added by the sender. But if in fact “c” also came from a reference parameter in the EPR used by the sender then follow-up messages will be incomplete. This puts more stress and responsibilities on the already weak @isReferenceParameter attribute. And, by encouraging people to accept EPRs from more and more sources, it puts EPR consumers are even greater risk for the problems described in bullet (1) of this objection.

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