A packaged was shipped to me through UPS. As usual, I received an email message informing me that it had shipped and giving me a URI to track its progress. This is what the URI looked like (after changing the tracking number and inserting a few line breaks):
http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking
/processRequest?HTMLVersion=5.0&Requester=NES
&AgreeToTermsAndConditions=yes&loc=en_US
&tracknum=123123123123
The interesting thing to notice, is that there is a parameter in the URI, called “AgreeToTermsAndConditions” and its value is set to “yes”. If you do a GET on this URI, you will receive, as expected, the description of the status of the shipment. On the other hand, if you go to the UPS Web site armed with just the tracking number you have to check a box that reads “By selecting this box and the ‘Track’ button, I agree to these Terms and Conditions” before you can track the shipment. It seems pretty clear that the “AgreeToTermsAndConditions” parameter is in the URI in order to plug into the same Web application from the email link as from the Web page and this application was designed to check that the parameter is present and set to “yes”.
This has several similarities with some of the discussions around WS-Addressing. First, it illustrates the need to plug into an application in a place where the application might not have been designed to allow you to do so. In this case, we can imagine that the tracking application was designed with the assumption that people would only invoke it from the UPS web site. One day UPS decided it would be nice to send in email a link that takes people directly to the status of a particular shipment rather than just tell them to “go to ups.com and enter your tracking ID in the tracking form”. One important reason for pushing back on the idea of wrapping reference properties is that it would prevent such a scenario in a SOAP world. For this reason I agree that a wrapper for reference properties is a bad idea and if reference properties remain in WS-Addressing the way to fix this mechanism is to leave them as SOAP headers but add a WS-Addressing-defined SOAP header to list headers that were added to a message only because an EPR requires it, with no implication that the sender stands behind any semantic that might be attached to them.
When I write about “fixing” reference properties in the previous sentence, I am referring to the fact that the current version of WS-Addressing creates a lot of confusion as to the implications of sending SOAP headers and whether I can be held liable by anything that is in a SOAP header I send (and potentially sign). This is the second thing that this UPS URI illustrates by analogy. As a human I get a sense of what a parameter called “AgreeToTermsAndConditions” corresponds to (even though the URI doesn’t tell me what these terms and conditions are). But what if the parameter name was shortened to its acronym “ATTAC”? In any case, I am not expected to understand the composition of this URI, I should be able to treat it as opaque. Just like resource properties. And for this reason, when I do a GET on the URI I am not bound by whatever the presence of this parameter in the URI is assumed to mean by UPS. This means that I can NEVER be bound by the content of a URI I dereference because how can one prove that I understand the semantic of the URI. Even when I fill a form on a Web site, I don’t know (unless I check the HTML) how the resulting URI (assuming the form uses GET) will come out. There might well be a hidden parameter in the form.
In a SOAP world, this can be fixed by meaningful, agreed-upon, headers. If people agree that by sending (and signing) a SOAP header you are making a statement, then you can build systems that can rely on the ability to make such statements as “I understand and agree to the set of terms and conditions identified by a given QName”. But this breaks down if people are able to say “I didn’t understand I was saying this, I was just echoing what you told me to say”. This is what the current WS-Addressing spec does, and what needs to be fixed. Let’s see how the UPS URI could translate to an endpoint reference. For this, we need to consider two scenarios, both of them equally valid.
Scenario 1: legacy integration
In this scenario, the UPS people decide they do not require the invoker to actually make a statement about the terms and conditions. They just need a SOAP header called “I agree to the terms and conditions” to be set to true because this is how their application is currently programmed (it will fail if it doesn’t see it). In this case, it is perfectly reasonable to put a “I agree to terms and conditions” element as a reference property and this element will be sent as a SOAP header, preventing the application from failing. But in order for SOAP headers to be used to make a statement in some cases, there needs to be a way to expressed when, as in this scenario, the invoker is not making a statement by including it. Thus my earlier proposal of a wsa:CoverMyRearside header (that points to all the headers I include for no reason other than because an EPR asks me to). The other option, as written down by Dims is to add an attribute in each such header. But there are two main drawbacks to this approach: (1) unlike a new SOAP header, I can’t mark an attribute “mustUnderstand=true” (Dims’ initial proposal actually had a SOAP header with “mustUnderstand=true” for this very reason) and (2) some elements might not allow arbitrary attributes to be added at the top level.
Scenario 2: meaningful header
In this second scenario, the UPS people want to make sure, before they return the tracking information, that the invoker has made a statement that it understands and agrees to the terms and conditions. In this case, it makes no sense to put a “”I agree to the terms and conditions” element as a reference property as what is intended is not for such an element to be echoed blindly but to be used to make an explicit statement. In this scenario, the EPR sent by UPS would contain all the opaque elements, those sent for the benefit of the UPS application but by which the invoker is not making a statement (from the look of the URI, this would be “HTMLVersion”, “Requester”, “loc” and “tracknum”). But the “agree to terms and conditions” header would not be specified as a reference property, it would be listed in the WSDL description of the service. And when the invoker sends this header, it would not be included in the wsa:CoverMyRearside header because the invoker is indeed making a statement by sending it.