CICS® supports services that use the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) specifications. This family of specifications provides transport-independent mechanisms to address web services and facilitate end-to-end addressing.
CICS ensures that your existing web service applications can accept requests from web services that use WS-Addressing. You can also create new web services that use endpoint references and message addressing properties in SOAP messages.
WS-Addressing adds addressing information, in the form of Message Addressing Properties (MAPs), to SOAP message headers. MAPs include messaging information, such as a unique message ID and endpoint references that detail where the message came from, where the message is going to, and where reply or fault messages are to be sent. An endpoint reference (EPR) is a specific type of MAP, which includes the destination address of the message, optional reference parameters for use by the application, and optional metadata.
Features of the WS-Addressing support
- Your web service requester and provider applications can interact with other services that are using WS-Addressing without requiring you to redeploy them. A new message handler, the addressing message handler DFHWSADH, in the pipeline routes messages that contain WS-Addressing information to the specified web service.
- You can write an application that uses the WS-Addressing API commands to create an endpoint reference and to create, update, delete, and query an addressing context.
- You can route response messages to endpoints other than the requester endpoint; for example, you can route fault messages to a dedicated fault handler.
- You can pass reference parameters to applications as part of the MAPs in the SOAP header.
