I agree the lifetime management is hard. :-) I wonder if this sort of scenario is not a good point in time for the client/initiator to: 1) Use the Agreement interface to capture the status and/or other identifying information. 2) "Retire" the Agreement by allowing it to be destroyed. 3) Have offline compensation using the captured status and identifying information. As I have said before, I think there is a practical limit to what can be done in the online, automatic system view of WS-Agreement. Shutting down/destroying those interfaces should not necessarily destroy records but just shift the information out of the online message processing system and into audit/accounting. Trying to negotiate compensation between humans is definitely out of scope (and too hard) for WS-Agreement, I would say. I guess I would frame the question as what sort of support is needed to allow such conversations to continue after the Agreement is terminated, e.g. access to "final state" and/or naming information that can be passed around offline? karl On Mar 22, Jon MacLaren loaded a tape reading: ...
It may be OK to "garbage collect" the agreement after all the terms have successfully completed. But where one or more terms have been violated, the initiator will want to be able to point at the agreement for an arbitrary length of time afterwards. They may wish to seek compensation through some out-of-bands methods.
Let me give a motivating use-case.
Lets say that something goes wrong with the execution of my job. Perhaps we'd agreed that it would execute at 4pm, but it didn't start until 4.30pm. I am offered a partial refund, but want to argue for more. I'll do this by email, but will want to refer to the agreement in some way...
Lifetime management for this sort of thing is hard.
karl
Jon.
-- Karl Czajkowski karlcz@univa.com