Transaction rollback and web services

Question

Given an example of calling two web services methods from a session bean, what if an exception is thrown between the calls to two methods? In the case of not calling the web services the transaction will rollback and no harm done. However, the web service will not rollback. Of course, even with a single web service there is a problem. While this is a generic question I am interested in solutions having to do with EJB session beans.

An easy and customized answer would be to add a special "rollback method" to the web service for each "real functionality" method. What I am asking for is some standardized way to do so.

Solution 1

Web Services-Coordination (WS-C) and Web Services-Transaction (WS-T) specifications developed by Microsoft, BEA Systems and IBM are used in such cases as I know. You can start from reading Web services transactions and A comparison of Web services transaction protocols articles provided by IBM to make it clear.

Solution 2

Actually, you usually don't just need a custom rollback method but also a custom commit method. Otherwise, you get into problems like those found in the WS-BA standard.

Just check out http://www.atomikos.com/Publications/TryCancelConfirm for a detailed article. The features mentioned there are available in Atomikos ExtremeTransactions... That product also supports classical 'ACID' style web service transactions.

HTH

Guy

Disclaimer: I work for Atomikos

Comments

[Darcy]

Neither links you provided work any longer. Not surprising since you posted this 8 years ago :)