18.2.3. WS_Transaction Models

It has been established that traditional transaction models are not appropriate for Web Services. No one specific protocol is likely to be sufficient, given the wide range of situations where Web service transactions are likely to be used. The WS-Transaction specification proposes two distinct models, where each supports the semantics of a particular kind of B2B interaction.
The following discussion presents the interactions between the client, web service and the transaction coordinator in great detail for expository purposes only. Most of this activity happens automatically behind the scenes. The actual APIs used to initiate and complete a transaction and to register a participant and drive it through the commit or abort process are described in Chapter 21, The XTS API.

18.2.3.1. Atomic Transactions

An atomic transaction (AT) is similar to traditional ACID transactions, and is designed to support short-duration interactions where ACID semantics are appropriate. Within the scope of an AT, web services typically employ bridging to allow them to access XA resources, such as databases and message queues, under the control of the web service transaction. When the transaction terminates, the participant propagates the outcome decision of the AT to the XA resources, and the appropriate commit or rollback actions are taken by each.
All services and associated participants are expected to provide ACID semantics, and it is expected that any use of atomic transactions occurs in environments and situations where ACID is appropriate. Usually, this environment is a trusted domain, over short durations.

Procedure 18.1. Atomic Transaction Process

  1. To begin an atomic transaction, the client application first locates a WS-C Activation Coordinator web service that supports WS-Transaction.
  2. The client sends a WS-C CreateCoordinationContext message to the service, specifying http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/10/wsat as its coordination type.
  3. The client receives an appropriate WS-Transaction context from the activation service.
  4. The response to the CreateCoordinationContext message, the transaction context, has its CoordinationType element set to the WS-Atomic Transaction namespace, http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/10/wsat. It also contains a reference to the atomic transaction coordinator endpoint, the WS-C Registration Service, where participants can be enlisted.
  5. The client normally proceeds to invoke Web Services and complete the transaction, either committing all the changes made by the web services, or rolling them back. In order to be able to drive this completion activity, the client must register itself as a participant for the Completion protocol, by sending a Register message to the Registration Service whose endpoint was returned in the Coordination Context.
  6. Once registered for Completion, the client application then interacts with Web Services to accomplish its business-level work. With each invocation of a business Web service, the client inserts the transaction context into a SOAP header block, such that each invocation is implicitly scoped by the transaction. The toolkits that support WS-Atomic Transaction-aware Web Services provide facilities to correlate contexts found in SOAP header blocks with back-end operations. This ensures that modifications made by the Web service are done within the scope of the same transaction as the client and subject to commit or rollback by the transaction coordinator.
  7. Once all the necessary application-level work is complete, the client can terminate the transaction, with the intent of making any changes to the service state permanent. The completion participant instructs the coordinator to try to commit or roll back the transaction. When the commit or roll-back operation completes, a status is returned to the participant to indicate the outcome of the transaction.
Although this description of the completion protocol seems straightforward, it hides the fact that in order to resolve the transaction to an outcome, several other participant protocols need to be followed.
Volatile2pc
The first of these protocols is the optional Volatile2PC (2PC is an abbreviation referring to the two-phase commit). The Volatile2PC protocol is the WS-Atomic Transaction equivalent of the synchronization protocol discussed earlier. It is typically executed where a Web service needs to flush volatile (cached) state, which may be used to improve performance of an application, to a database prior to the transaction committing. Once flushed, the data is controlled by a two-phase aware participant.
When the completion participant initiates a commit operation, all Volatile2PC participants are informed that the transaction is about to complete, via the prepare message. The participants can respond with one of three messages: prepared, aborted, or readonly. A failure at this stage causes the transaction to roll back.
Durable2PC
The next protocol in the WS-Atomic Transaction is Durable2PC. The Durable2PC protocol is at the core of WS-Atomic Transaction. It brings about the necessary consensus between participants in a transaction, so the transaction can safely be terminated.
The Durable2PC protocol ensures atomicity between participants, and is based on the classic technique of two-phase commit with presumed abort.

Procedure 18.2. Durable2PC Procedure

  1. During the first phase, when the coordinator sends the prepare message, a participant must make durable any state changes that occurred during the scope of the transaction, so these changes can either be rolled back or committed later. None of the original state information can be lost at this point, since the atomic transaction may still roll back. If the participant cannot prepare, it must inform the coordinator, by means of the aborted message. The transaction will ultimately roll back. If the participant is responsible for a service that did not change any of the transaction's data,, it can return the readonly message, causing it to be omitted from the second phase of the commit protocol. Otherwise, the prepared message is sent by the participant.
  2. If no failures occur during the first phase, Durable2PC proceeds to the second phase, in which the coordinator sends the commit message to participants. Participants then make permanent the tentative work done by their associated services, and send a committed message to the coordinator. If any failures occur, the coordinator sends the rollback message to all participants, causing them to discard tentative work done by their associated services, and delete any state information saved to persistent storage at prepare, if they have reached that stage. Participants respond to a rollback by sending an aborted message to the coordinator.

Note

The semantics of the WS-Atomic Transaction protocol do not include the one-phase commit optimization. A full two-phase commit is always used, even where only a single participant is enlisted.
Figure 18.6, “WS-Atomic Two-Phase Participant State Transitions” shows the state transitions of a WS-Atomic Transaction and the message exchanges between coordinator and participant. Messages generated by the coordinator are represented by solid lines, while the participants' messages use dashed lines.
WS-Atomic Two-Phase Participant State Transitions

Figure 18.6. WS-Atomic Two-Phase Participant State Transitions

Once the Durable2PC protocol completes, the Completion protocol that originally began the termination of the transaction can complete, and inform the client application whether the transaction was committed or rolled back. Additionally, the Volatile2PC protocol may complete.
Like the prepare phase of Volatile2PC, the final phase is optional and can be used to inform participants about the transaction's completion, so that they can release resources such as database connections.
Any registered Volatile2PC participants are invoked after the transaction terminates, and are informed about the transaction's completion state by the coordinator. Since the transaction has terminated, any failures of participants at this stage are ignored, since they have no impact on outcomes.
Figure 18.7, “AT protocol model” illustrates the intricate interweaving of individual protocols comprising the AT as a whole.
AT protocol model

Figure 18.7. AT protocol model