SOAP and Transactions

[chris kelly]

Hi Bill,
I am new to SOAP and was just wondering how does
SOAP handle transactions. For instance if had a SOAP service which relied on another service that failed what would happen to the original request. Do I need to handle the failure explicitly or is there some sort of atomic operation whereas if one dependent service fails, the entire operation fails.
Thanks for any information.

[Andrew Sweeney]

Hey Chris,
You may want to look into WSFL (Web Services Flow) for some of this. Right now, IBM is running the push for it, but it does look promising. I am running into similar issues right now. Here are the links...
<a href="http://www-4.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservices/pdf/WSFL.pdf">The WSFL proposal</a>
<a href="http://xml.coverpages.org/wsfl.html">Some more info here...</a>
Thanks to Kyle for the original URLs.
Cheers,
Andrew

[William Brogden]

There is a formal fault reporting mechanism laid out in the specifications and supported by Apache SOAP. As programmer of a SOAP RPC service, it is your responsibility to turn exceptions, etc. into an informative fault message that goes back to a client. Considering all of the things that go can wrong, fault reporting and interpretation on the client end is very important.

Bill

[Andy Rodriguez]

More here : http://www.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000074