RE: Proposal: handlerInfoChain at deployment and globalConfigurat ion levels

[Tom Jordahl <to...@macromedia.com>]

+1 - sounds useful and reasonable to me.

But Glen is the expert on handler chains; he was one of the original architects.

Glen?

--
Tom Jordahl
Macromedia Server Development

-----Original Message-----
From: Vance Maverick [mailto:maverick@cs.unibo.it] 
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 6:03 AM
To: axis-dev@ws.apache.org
Subject: Re: Proposal: handlerInfoChain at deployment and globalConfiguration levels

Correction -- my first proposal reflected a misunderstanding.  requestFlow
and responseFlow declarations aren't processed as children of the deployment
element -- only as children of the globalConfiguration and service elements.
So here's the proposal again, simplified to comport with reality.

--

I would like to be able to declare JAX-RPC-style Handlers at the
globalConfiguration level.  (It's already possible to declare Axis-style
handlers there, in requestFlow and responseFlow chains.)  While I'm doing
this to meet a need of my own, I would ultimately like to
contribute the work to the Axis project -- so I'd like to get feedback from
the community on the best way to do it.

Syntactically, the only novelty will be to allow the existing
handlerInfoChain element as a child of globalConfiguration, as well as of
service.

As for the semantics, I believe that it's pretty straightforward to say that
the handler chain for a service consists of
- the handlers from the globalConfiguration handler chain, if any, in order
- followed by the handlers from the chain declared for the service itself,
if any, in order.
Thus in the sample deployment file below, the JAX-RPC chain for service X
consists of handlers 1, 2, 3, and 4, in that order; the chain for service Y
is handlers 1, 2, 5, and 6.

What do people think?  The implementation is simple (small modifications to
WSDDService and WSDDGlobalConfiguration; support for concatenation in
WSDDJAXRPCHandlerInfoChain).  Existing WSDD files would continue to work as
expected.

Is there a Sun proposal for configuring these chains that should be taken
into account?

    Vance

== Simplified example of extended handlerInfoChain syntax ==
<deployment>
 <globalConfiguration>
  <handlerInfoChain>
   <handlerInfo classname="handler.1"/>
   <handlerInfo classname="handler.2"/>
  </handlerInfoChain>
 </globalConfiguration>

 <service name="X" provider="java:RPC">
  <parameter name="className" value="service.X"/>

  <handlerInfoChain>
   <handlerInfo classname="handler.3"/>
   <handlerInfo classname="handler.4"/>
  </handlerInfoChain>
 </service>

 <service name="Y" provider="java:RPC">
  <parameter name="className" value="service.Y"/>

  <handlerInfoChain>
   <handlerInfo classname="handler.5"/>
   <handlerInfo classname="handler.6"/>
  </handlerInfoChain>
 </service>
</deployment>