WS-Eventing design seen from two perspectives … and another interesting insight about WS-Addressing

Perspective 1:

I am not a fan of the way WS-Eventing is relying on WS-Addressing's EPR binding rules to correlate subscription responses (containing a parameterized "wse:SubscriptionManager" EPR holding the subscription identifier in wsa:ReferenceParameters, see table 5, line 24-26 in WS-Eventing) with subsequent renewals, unsubscribe and status inquiry operations and forces the most central information bit for the respective operation ("Which subscription do you wish to renew?") into the header of the respective message (wse:Identifier) instead of having it in the body.

So for the "GetStatus" operation, you end up with a single body element "GetStatus" that doesn't carry any content [see table 8, lines 19-21 and line 24 in WS-Eventing]. I know that XML lost everything intuitive about it a long time back, but the way this works is really counterintuitive and just doesn't look right. I would expect <GetStatus>uri:Subscription-Identifier</GetStatus>.

Perspective 2:

Now on the other hand! this is actually a sound approach if I were looking at the said SubscriptionManager EPR as a resource. What the wsa:ReferenceParameter does to the EPR is that it binds it uniquely to the respective subscription (section 1.3 of the spec mandates this).

What's confusing here (and not really a good name choice in my view) is that the wse:SubscriptionManager EPR does NOT only point to the subscription manager endpoint, but rather binds all the way through to a specific subscription. Once the binding process to that subscription is done, the requsted action is then executed on the bound resource.

Ok ... I am sorry ... too abstract? I'll rephrase.

What I am saying is that WS-Eventing is an example showing how messages aren't necessarily targeted at the thing with [WebMethod] on top of it, but they may indeed be targeted at something more specific like a database record. So the binding of the endpoint reference is not a matter of the client stopping at http://somewhere/blahblah.asmx but is only complete when the wse:Identifier header is evaluated on the service-side and inside blahblah.asmx, resolved against the subscription database and the actual message target, the respective subscription record, is found. Once the EPR is fully resolved to yield the message target (the record), <GetStatus/> indeed becomes a parameterless operation and the body does not have to carry further content.

EPR = Moniker ;-)