Action vs Reply action WCF

What's the use of action/reply action for service operation in WCF. So far, what I've understood is; action is used by WSDL to identify the service operation to which the message from the client belongs and in return reply action is used by service operation to identify the caller to which reply message belong --> Please correct me if I am wrong with this!

Now, I want to understand; what's the real use (apart from handling anonymous messages by using aster ix [*]), I mean this could well be handled internally by WCF instead of exposing it to the developer.

Also, why is action and replyaction required at all? I mean, we already have a name property for the service operation to identify the method and when I call Proxy.SomeMethod() then somemethod is already mapped to the Name property and it should be enough to identify the destination method for the message and similarly the replyaction. Please clarify.

Can I please get a simple real world sc开发者_开发问答enario/or link to that to understand Action/ReplyAction in real life.

Many Thanks.

Actions are part of the various SOAP and WS-* specifcations.

So the first point is that this is not something unique to WCF it is a standard part of the specification you need to support if you want to have interoperable web services. They are used for message routing and other message handling functions.

Second, WCF DOES manage these by default. You only need to specify them yourself if you wish to customise or manage them in some other way. E.g. WCF will automatically generate them into the WSDL for you. WCF will also use them by default when it is selecting which operation to invoke for an incoming message. Again, WCF provides extension points to customise this behavior if you require.