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WS-Addressing & WS-Policy: If I add the WSDL notations to make WS-Addres

• From: "Karr, David" <david.karr@w...>
• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:39:13 -0700

So, in reading Thomas Erl's latest tome, "Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA", I had a definite interest in the details of specifying requirements for WS-Addressing in WSDLs, using WS-Policy expressions.  It appears to be quite simple to specify in the WSDL that WS-Addressing is required in the message, and you can at least specify what the "wsa:Action" value should be.

Specifying that WS-Addressing is required is simply done with this element at the "service" element (it might be ok in others also):

    <wsp:Policy>
        <wsp:All>
            <wsam:Addressing><wsp:Policy/></wsam:Addressing>
        </wsp:All>
    </wsp:Policy>

In addition, adding a "wsam:Action" attribute to the "wsdl:input" element specifies the value that is required for the "wsa:Action" element in the SOAP Header.

My question is, after I've set up these incantations, should I actually expect any tools or frameworks to do anything with this?

So far, I've only experimented with WebLogic 10.3 and Parasoft SOATest.  The latter is used for testing web services, including various issues with WS-* compliance, and the former "fully supports" WS-Addressing and WS-Policy.  The results from experimenting with this enhanced WSDL are less than impressive.  WebLogic apparently didn't do anything with the Policy expression.  Not in the generated code, and not even in the browser test client it generates for simple testing of the web service.  With SOATest, I asked it to generate all the tests for WS-* compliance.  All the tests apparently passed, even though the service was apparently ignoring the policy expression, and didn't care if WS-Addressing headers weren't present?

Am I being unreasonable?  Are there web service frameworks that actually pay attention to this and do something useful with the information?