4.1 Overview

WS-AT defines a policy assertion that allows requests to indicate whether an operation call must or may be made as part of an Atomic Transaction. For the configuration impact of Atomic Transaction policy assertions, see the "Configuration Changes" chapter.

Depending on the direction of the calls and meaning of the policy assertion setting, the runtime inbound/outbound transaction behavior is as follows:

• Inbound Transactions

  For inbound transactions, there are no particular runtime behavior changes. The client consuming the WSDL accepts transactions based on the configured value. Runtime behavior is normal.

• Outbound Transactions
  • If an ATAssertion element without "Optional=true" is configured for a service, the call has to be made in a transaction. If no corresponding XA transaction exists at the time, the WS-TX transaction is initiated (but not associated with any Oracle Tuxedo XA transactions). If an XA transaction exists, there is no change in behavior.
  • If an ATAssertion element with "Optional=true" is configured for a service, an outbound transaction context is requested only if a corresponding Oracle Tuxedo XA transaction exists in the context of the call.
  • If no ATAssertion element is configured for a service, the corresponding service call is made outside of any transaction. When a call is made to an external Web Service in the context of an Oracle Tuxedo XA transaction, the Web Service call does not propagate the transaction. This allows excluding certain Web Service calls from a global transaction, and represents the default for most existing Web Services calls that do not support WS-TX.