WS-Addressing

WS-Addressing defines SOAP header elements that identify the operation, the message, the destination and the reply endpoint of an exchange. IHE document-exchange profiles and many government endpoints require these headers on every request.

WS-Addressing is enabled with the WS-Addressing checkbox on the SOAP tab of an outgoing connection.

Request headers

With the checkbox on, every request includes:

• wsa:Action - the connection's SOAP action
• wsa:MessageID - a fresh unique identifier per request
• wsa:To - the connection's address
• wsa:ReplyTo - the anonymous reply endpoint, meaning replies come back on the same HTTP response

Your service does not build any of these - it assigns business fields to a SOAPMessage and the headers are added when invoke runs.

Response headers

The reply's addressing headers are parsed off the response and exposed as the reserved addressing attribute - a service can inspect them when it needs them and ignore them otherwise:

response = self.soap['Document Registry'].invoke('DocumentQuery', request)

addressing = response.addressing

self.logger.info('Reply action: %s', addressing.action)
self.logger.info('Reply message id: %s', addressing.message_id)
self.logger.info('In reply to: %s', addressing.relates_to)

relates_to echoes the wsa:MessageID of the request that the reply answers, and correlation-aware endpoints use it to match each reply to its request.

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