ActiveVOS Server User’s Guide

Endpoint References and WS-Policy

The ActiveVOS server supports the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy). The WS-Policy specification allows Web service providers and clients to express a broad range of capabilities, requirements, and preferences in a standard way through policy assertions. BPEL process deployment descriptor files can include one or more policy assertions within a partner link’s endpoint reference.

Many policy assertions specify both an inbound and outbound direction. An inbound assertion governs messages received by the BPEL process, such as messages for receives and replies from invoked services. An outbound assertion governs messages sent by the process, such as requests to an invoked service and replies matching receives.

In ActiveVOS Designer, you can add policy assertions for partner links in the PDD Wizard. See the ActiveVOS Designer Online Help for details.

As a simpler alternative to adding individual policy assertions to partner links, you can add a policy reference. The policy reference is a pointer to policies defined in the process’s WSDL file. For details, see User-Defined Policy Assertion.

The supported policy assertions are described in the following table:

Policy

Description

WS-Security Policy Assertions:

Authentication

Credentials required for access to a service

Encryption

Describes the parts of a SOAP message to encrypt

Signature

Describes the parts of a SOAP message to sign with an XML Signature, using an X.509 Certificate token

Timestamp

Adds a <Timestamp> element to the SOAP header of a message

Other Policy Assertions:

Retry

Describes when and how many times to retry an invoked service that does not reply

Engine-Managed Correlation

A My Role policy assertion that directs the ActiveVOS server to use WS-Addressing to transmit replyTo endpoint references during transmissions to the Partner Role partner link

WS-Reliable Messaging

Specifies that a partner link participates in an industry-standard protocol that supports guaranteed delivery of messages

User-Defined Policy Assertion

Placeholder for a custom solution you provide for handling messages from a particular service provider. Place where you can add WS-Policy Reference.

WS-Reliable Messaging

Specifies that a partner link participates in an industry-standard protocol that supports guaranteed delivery of messages

JMS Delivery Options

For details, see

HTTP Transport

Used for REST-based invocations

REST Enabled

Used for REST-based invocations

SAML

The Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) is an OASIS standard that enables loosely coupled and federated identity integration.

Message Validation

Provide fine-grained validation of WSDL messages for a partner link to enable faster processing

Web Service Timeout

Set an amount of time to wait for a specific Web service to time out

Invoke Recovery

Select whether to suspend a process with a pending invoke when the recovers from a failed server

Send WS-Addressing Headers

Explicitly add addressing to invokes

WSDL Binding Reference

Applicable for a my role partnerlink to refer to a WSDL binding instead of RPC or Document.

Suppress xsi:type

A workaround for suppressing schema validation in SOAP messages, useful for dealing with legacy services that cannot handle xsi:type attributes