Transaction across basicHttpBinding

Question

Hi, we currently have an asmx webservice which exposes a single method to make various updates to a Sql database, wrapped internally in a SqlTransaction.

I am re-writing this service in WCF and we would like to split up the existing method into sub-calls accessed through various different WCF services. There is a restriction to use basicHttpBinding on the services, which rules out all the built-in WCF transaction features. Is it possible to go with this architecture and maintain a transaction across multiple service calls? WS-TRANS has been suggested as a possible solution but I'm not familiar with it, would this work?

Answer 1

As far as I know WS-TRANS stands for Translation Web Services so that is not going to work.

What you mean is WS-TX of which WS-AtomicTransaction is a part. BasicHttpBinding simply does not support WS-AtomicTransaction. I'm afraid that your setup is not going to work...

Answer 2

It's very rare that you get something for nothing. The chief difference between basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding is that the latter supports the WS-* protocols.

basicHttpBinding gives you what you had with ASMX, more or less. "transactions" would be much more than you had with ASMX.