Multiref responses with ElementDeserializer

[Tom Oinn <tm...@ebi.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

We're seeing a slightly strange behaviour with an Axis 1.2.1 server 
returning a response containing multiref elements when we try to 
register the ElementDeserializer to handle it - the call completes but 
returns only part of the response. I guess it's not entirely clear what 
the serializer should do in this case and I noticed that the javadoc 
mentions that elements with href tags in are handled differently (ignored?)

One option of course would be to turn off the multiref response in the 
server and that's almost certainly what we'll end up doing, I'm just 
curious about the best way to handle this if it comes up in the future 
in a context where we don't control the service. We use the 
ElementDeserializer to return an XML document for cases where the 
response doesn't map elegantly onto a simple java type, this is all in 
the context of a workflow design system (http://taverna.sf.net) where we 
have no compile time knowledge of the services and must invoke them 
dynamically - the approach works well enough but seems to have this 
issue with multirefs.

Any comments, thoughts etc? I know that what I'd ideally like (expand 
multirefs into inlined tags) isn't possible in the general case as 
multirefs are there largely to allow cyclic data structures - obviously 
these won't map to XML trees, but much of the time the multirefs are 
just used by default and could be expanded. Either that or they could be 
converted to a single document using something like XLink perhaps?

Cheers,

Tom