A fire-and-forget feature in scenario S1 requires a mechanism to send a message to a single SOAP Receiver and is illustrated in Figure 1. The SOAP Sender does not require any status information that the message has been sent to or received by the recipient. The underlying transport protocol may implement a response mechanism, but status on whether the message was successfully sent or otherwise is not returned to the sending SOAP Processor.

Scenario S2 extends S1 to implement a fire-and-forget feature to multiple SOAP Receivers and is illustrated in Figure 2. This requires a mechanism to deliver the same message to multiple SOAP Receivers. The delivery of the messages could be implemented using multicast distribution technology if the underlying transport layer supports this. An alternative implementation may use repeated applications of scenario S1 with a distribution list of intended recipients.

If the underlying transport protocol supports the correlation of a request and its matching response directly, then the solution illustrated in Figure 3 may be appropriate. An example of such an underlying transport protocol would be a synchronous HTTP POST. This implementation would make use of the transport binding proposed in other XML Protocol WG documents. The business document sent as a request by the SOAP Sender would be inserted as the payload of the request message. Following the receipt of the request, the processing application would generate a document which would be returned as the payload of the response message with appropiate status codes. If for whatever reason, the request message was not received or processed by the intended business application, suitable status messages would be generated by the underlying transport layer and reported to the SOAP Sender.

Figure 5 illustrates an RPC invocation over an underlying transport protocol such as HTTP that supports request/response. In this case, no additional headers are needed to correlate the request and response messages. Example request and response SOAP messages are:

Figure 7 illustrates a request/response scenario with the SOAP Sender requesting status information from the matching SOAP Receiver. This status may provide delivery information to the sender in addition to other business related responses that the receiving application may generate. Figure 7 assumes that the underlying transport protocol supports the request/response exchange model. A Status Handler is registered with the SOAP Sender and configured to request the status information. A matching handler on the SOAP Receiver generates the requested status information and places it in the response message which is then returned to the originating SOAP Sender.

In the example SOAP messages below, a StatusRequest header element includes an identifier for the message being sent. The inclusion of the StatusRequest header results in the receiving SOAP processor including a StatusResponse Header in the response. This includes information about the delivered message including an enumerated status and timestamp.

Scenario S6 describes two applications that wish to share encrypted data as an opaque body in a SOAP message. It places no requirements on the SOAP messaging layer. Figure 8 illustrates this scenario.

The following is the encrypted version of the above plain SOAP message. The body entry <m:GetLastTradePrice> is encrypted using a symmetric key identified by the key name "Symmetric Key" and replaced by the <xenc:EncryptedData> element with an id "encrypted-body-entry". A <sec:Encryption> header entry for this encrypted data is added to the SOAP header. Note that the <sec:EncryptedDataList> element in the header entry has a reference to the <xenc:EncryptedData> element. The symmetric key used for encryption is stored in the <xenc:EncryptedKey> element in the header entry in an encrypted form, that is, it is encrypted by John Smith's RSA public key.

Figure 9 illustrates an infrastructure where SOAP based messaging is used to support a third party marketplace acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. The market place business model involves the recruitment of multiple suppliers for goods and services. Buyers may then connect to the marketplace and take advantage of the services they provide. The marketplace acts as a channel for the commercial transactions between a buyer and its chosen seller. A marketplace can exist to serve both B2B and B2C transactions.

In scenario S7, the marketplace acts as a blind intermediary. A buyer connects to the marketplace and places an order for items or services it requires. The buyer may be as simple as a browser or as complex as a procurement application. Once the marketplace has received the buyer’s order, it contacts an appropriate set of sellers who then provide competitive bids aginst the order. The marketplace can then select the most attractive bid and connect the winning seller to the buyer. A purchasing process is then initiated with the marketplace acting as an intermediary in the transaction.

From a SOAP messaging point of view, the scenario illustrated in Figure 9 consists of a set of request/response messages between the buyer and the marketplace resulting in the buyer’s order being registered. Once received, the marketplace then contacts its set of selected sellers again by a set of request/response messages. Design decisions made during the implementation of the marketplace software will determine whether supplier messages are sent from a single SOAP Sender to multiple SOAP Receivers, one at each of the seller’s sites. Alternatively, a SOAP Sender could be instantiated for each supplier and a physical 1:1 relationship established. Prior agreements on message qualities such as reliability, security and structure would be put in place between the marketplace and its sellers. These qualities would define what additional SOAP Handlers were needed for the message exchange patterns between the marketplace and sellers.

Interactions between business partners are usually more complex than a single request/response message exchange. A long running set of message exchanges may, for example be used to implement a business interaction such as procurement of goods or services. In this case there are advantages in grouping individual messages into a longer running set of exchanges. Such an exchange of messages is known as a conversation. Conversations may continue between a pair of trading partners for a long time. Completion of a conversation instance may take days, weeks or months.

A conversation between two trading partners may be defined by shared configuration information such as an ebXML Trading Partner Agreement (TPA). A TPA includes information such as expected response times, business process actions that each party undertakes to complete, security information and message content structures. In a procurement process, an example conversation may be:

All of the example message exchanges are related an instance of the TPA between the two partners. For a message to be valid as part of the agreed rules, each partner has to check whether the current message is valid within the scope of the TPA.

Figure 10 illustrates how this scenario could be implemented. Each partner’s SOAP processor has access to a database which is configured by the TPA agreed between the two partners. A Conversation State Handler in the SOAP Sender configures its SOAP Block with information that identifies a message with conversation instance it is part of. A matching handler in the SOAP Receiver uses the sender’s information to test whether the received message is acceptable within the rules of the TPA. It does this by checking with its own rules database where the state information on each of the conversation instances currently active is stored. If a message violates the rules of the TPA, then the application can raise a fault condition.

Note that Figure 10 does not include handlers for other message headers to support reliability or security which may be required under the agreed TPA.

In the following request and response examples, a ConversationState Header is used to identify which agreement governs the exchange between the two trading partners (AgreementId). To support multiple concurrent conversations under the same agreement, a ConversationId element is included. The values of AgreementId and ConversationId will remain constant for the lifetime of a particular conversational exchange and will appear in both request and response messages.

In scenario S6, two applications communicated using encrypted payloads. These opaque payloads had no impact on the SOAP processing layer. In this scenario, the action of signing and/or encrypting the headers or payload is the responsibility of the SOAP processing layer. Figure 11 illustrates how the encryption agreements are accessible to a Message Signing Handler on the SOAP Sender and a matching Message Verification Handler on the SOAP Receiver. An additional Message Routing Header may also be part of the SOAP message. This header may also be signed and verified if needed by the security requirements of the message exchange.

Scenario S11 requires an audit chain to be created between a SOAP Sender that originates the message and the ultimate SOAP Receiver including any SOAP Intermediaries that the message passes through. Figure 12 illustrates a possible implementation of this scenario. Each SOAP Node on the message path has access to a persistent store (typically a database) that can be used to store an audit record for each message. A Routing Logging Handler on each SOAP Node has the responsibility of logging each message in the persistent store. A further responsibility of the handler is to sign the message routing header before passing the message on to the next SOAP Node in the path. Support for certificates and other artifacts required for signing a message are not shown.

Scenario DS17 is the same as the basic request/response pattern described in scenario S3. The difference is that the request and response messages are separated in time and implemented as two unidirectional messages. The sending SOAP Application does not block and wait for the response to return. The sending SOAP Application is notified when a response is received by its SOAP Receiver. It then uses the correlation information within the received message to match the response to a message it sent some time earlier.

Figure 11 illustrates a possible implementation. In the request SOAP message, a Message Identifier Handler is responsible for generating a unique message identifier and inserting it into a SOAP Header. This forms part of the SOAP request message and is sent from SOAP Application 1 to the receiving SOAP Application 2. The request message is processed by a business application and a response message is assembled. This includes a SOAP Header built by a Message Correlation Handler which links the response message to its associated request.

Support for non-XML data has been described elsewhere. The SOAP with Attachments note to the W3C has been adopted by the ebXML Message Services specification as the basis for defining a message structure which can support non-XML data. Supporting non-XML data requires additional packaging of the message which can be provided by a MIME multipart structure and impacts the binding of a message to its underlying transport protocol. Figure 14 illustrates a unidirectional SOAP message path. A Message Manifest Handler is implemented which creates a set of references to the different parts of a multipart MIME package. Each part is referenced by its content identifier.

Scenario S20 is an extension of scenario DS17 - asynchronous messaging. Instead of a single response message, more than one can be sent by the receiving application to the originator. A simple architecture would be the same as DS17 with multiple responses received by the originating application and corelated to the original request by a Message Correlation Handler. Figure 15 illustrates an extension to this using a Sequence Handler. The Sequence Handler ensures that a unique sequence number is added to each response message. If the responding application knows in advance that there will be a fixed number of multiple responses, then the Sequence Handler may use an N of M format to indicate how many response messages are to be expected.

Scenario S23 describes event notification using a publish subscribe mechanism. An implementation of this scenario uses an example of the request/response scenario S3 to register a subscription and fire-and-forget to multiple receivers scenario S2 for the notification. Figure 17 illustrates how a request/response message pattern can be used with a Subscription Request Handler to register an interest (or subscription) in some set of events. The registration is made with some subscription service. The success or otherwise of the registration is returned to the subscribing application using a Subscription Ack Handler which provides an acknowledgement to the subscribing application.

Delivery of an event noification to a set of subscribers may be implemented using the fire-and-forget to multiple receivers scenario S2. The subscription service provides the list of valid applications that have registered an interested in a particular event. This list may then be converted into a group address or distribution list to support the implementation of the fire-and-forget scenario.

A subscription request may include a list of events within the SOAP Body as in the following example.In this example, a subscription is registered with a stock price notification service. The subscribing application will be informed of company BigCo’s stock price, volume traded and time whenever the price is greater than 100.

An acknowledgement may include an identifier to the subscription as in the following example:

The identification may be used in subsequent notifications to the application as a result of the subscription:

SOAP Application 1 initiates a request for catalog price information illustrated in the following example.

The caching intermediary SOAP Application 2 is unable to fulfil the request from its local store so it forward the request which ultimately arrives at the catalog server SOAP Application 3. The catalog server process the request and assembles a response message containing the requested price information. An additional SOAP Header is placed in the response to control any caches that may exist in the return path. The CacheControl Header contains a CacheKey which allows matching of future requests to the cached response together with an Expires element that sets the time the local copy must be purged. This response is returned via the caching intermediary.

At the caching intermediary, the CacheControl header information is used to make a local copy of the response message, keyed by the CacheKey. The copy will be purged at the time specified by the Expires element. The CacheControl header element is removed by the intermediary and the catalog price information is returned to the original sender. The request/response path for this message is the complete roundtrip between the original SOAP Sender and SOAP Receiver and is shown by Message Path 1 in Figure 18.

Since there is now a local copy of the price information for item ABC-1234 in the intermediary cache, subsequent requests for price information can be fulfilled by the intermediary. This is the shorter request/response path Message Path 2.

Scenario S805 describes a routing requirement whch is addressed in detail by the WS-Routing (formerly SOAP-RP) specification. This describes how a message may be reouted through some messaging infrastructure. Once the message has arrived at its ultimate receiver, the route the message has taken may be required for auditing purposes. A track of the message path may be created by adding a tracking header to the message in addition to any routing information.

This is illustrated in the following example. A routing header has been added to the message in accordance with WS-Routing . A TrackingHeader is used to maintain a list of Intermediary names and associated Timestamp elements. As the message passes through each intermediary, a Tracking Handler appends a Via element to the TrackingHeader. The Via element contains the name of the intermediary together with the date/time the message arrived or was forwarded by the intermediary. The list of Via elements therefore forms the audit trail for the message.