Open discussion on how to handle the Actor attribute

[olivier brand <ol...@vodafone-us.com>]

All,

I believe the role of the Actor attribute is to provide some kind of 
proxying capability (The first SOAP server redirects to the URL 
specified in the Actor attribute).
If we look at the proxy example in the Axis samples directory, we are 
seeing similar functionalities. The author wrote a comment on how to 
code this forwarding URL though.... I think that the ACtor attribute is 
the clean way to do it, not a hardcoded value in the WSDD.

Now the javax.xml.soap package includes all the SOAP specific elements 
(Header, Envelope, ...), this is javasoft standard packages and Axis 
relies on those (provide an implementation in Axis).

For instance the javax.xml.soap.SOAPHeaderElement  offers a set/get 
Actor, which place the actor attribute in the SOAP header.
I imagine that in the Proxy class, we coulkd extract this header and 
forward the call to the URL found in the Actor attribute.

That will be a standard way to do it. But it would be nice if the SOAP 
server , therefore Axis, was handling this automatically.

What are your thoughts on this dynamic forwarding of requests ? I think 
that all the elements of the framework are in place to achieve this.
How feasible is it to add and extract the Actor attribute using the high 
level JAX-RPC API ? Could you provide an example on scanning the 
SOAPHeader starting from a high level JAX-RPC call ? Is it possible to 
add the Actor attribute in the Call object ??

Olivier