a fundamental limitation?

[Geoff Hendrey <Ge...@gravitate-usa.com>]

this question regards SOAP and inheritence. I am using soap 2.0. 

Consider an abstract base class AbstractResponse, and derived classes
ResponseX and ResponseY.

I have a method call on the server side that returns an AbstractResponse.
(of course what it returns is really ResponseX and sometimes ResponseY, but
these are both AbstractResponse and it is perfectly legal in java to type
the return as AbstractResponse).

When I make the call using the remote soap client, the variables in
ResponseX and ResponseY that are not found in the base class are disposed
of. 

So I took a look using the TCPTunnel GUI. Sure enough, the XML returned,
represented only an AbstractResponse. Never ResponseX or ResponseY with all
their additional fields. This is obviously a problem for those of us that
use OO design.

Of course we have a work around, but I prefer to do things the "right" way.

This is a fundamental concern regarding the OO capabilities of SOAP. Please
get back to me ASAP.