Puneet Varma (Editor)

WS Addressing

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Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) is a specification of transport-neutral mechanism that allows web services to communicate addressing information. It essentially consists of two parts: a structure for communicating a reference to a Web service endpoint, and a set of message addressing properties which associate addressing information with a particular message.

Contents

Description

WS-Addressing is a standardized way of including message routing data within SOAP headers. Instead of relying on network-level transport to convey routing information, a message utilizing WS-Addressing may contain its own dispatch metadata in a standardized SOAP header. The network-level transport is only responsible for delivering that message to a dispatcher capable of reading the WS-Addressing metadata. Once that message arrives at the dispatcher specified in the URI, the job of the network-level transport is done.

WS-Addressing supports the use of asynchronous interactions by specifying a common SOAP header (wsa:ReplyTo) that contains the endpoint reference (EPR) to which the response is to be sent. The service provider transmits the response message over a separate connection to the wsa:ReplyTo endpoint. This decouples the lifetime of the SOAP request/response interaction from the lifetime of the HTTP request/response protocol, thus enabling long-running interactions that can span arbitrary periods of time.

Message addressing properties

Message addressing properties communicate addressing information relating to the delivery of a message to a Web service:

  • Message destination URI
  • Source endpoint -- the endpoint of the service that dispatched this message (EPR)
  • Reply endpoint -- the endpoint to which reply messages should be dispatched (EPR)
  • Fault endpoint -- the endpoint to which fault messages should be dispatched (EPR)
  • Action -- an action value indicating the semantics of the message (may assist with routing the message) URI
  • Unique message ID URI
  • Relationship to previous messages (A pair of URIs)

    • History

    WS-Addressing was originally authored by Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Sun Microsystems, and SAP and submitted to W3C for standardization. The W3C WS-Addressing Working Group has refined and augmented the specification in the process of standardization.

    WS-Addressing is currently specified in three parts:

  • The Core specification of Endpoint References and Message Addressing Properties.
  • A binding of these properties to SOAP.
  • The Metadata specification defines how the abstract properties defined in Core are described using WSDL, how to include WSDL metadata in endpoint references, and how WS-Policy can be used to indicate the support of WS-Addressing by a Web service.

    • Web Services Policy Attachment for Endpoint Reference (WS-PAEPR) specifies the mechanism and meaning of including WS-Policy expressions in Endpoint References. WS-PAEPR is a W3C Member Submission.

    References

    WS-Addressing Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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