Enhancing Web Services Conversation with Exception Contexts for Handling Exceptions of Composite Services

The successful execution of a composite service relies on not only its internal design and states, but also the execution of its autonomous, heterogeneous, and distributed participants. Exception handling for a composite service is facing great challenge. This paper presents a mechanism to capture external exception contexts from partners' applications through contexts enhanced Web services conversation (CeWSC), which introduces just a minimal overhead by an effective use of SOAP header and acknowledgement. Moreover, we also propose an enhanced event-driven mechanism to incorporate exception contexts into exception handling for a composite service to facilitate its flexible and reliable execution.