Failed state during prepare of WS-AT error and Oracle XA WebLogic data source

I've been experimenting with WS-Atomic Transaction for a number of years now, though none of that work has made it past the POC stages...until now. Then, recently I've started working on a web service that made use of WS-AT to ensure that data was committed atomically between two distinct products in the stack, both of which were running in separate WebLogic managed servers. Everything was going just fine until we enabled the use of TransactionalFeature on the web service proxies and all hell broke loose...

None of the WS-AT enabled web service calls would work and failed with the following exception...

Error

weblogic.transaction.RollbackException : Could not prepare resource '0BI_WSATGatewayRMxxxx

Failed state during prepare of WS-AT XAResource:WSATXAResource: xidBEA1-xxxx status:Aborted epr:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<ns0:EndpointReference xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing"><ns0:Address>http://1.1.1.1:1111/wls-wsat/ParticipantPortType</ns0:Address><ns0:ReferenceParameters><wls-wsat:txId xmlns:wls-wsat="http://weblogic.wsee.wstx.wsat/ws/2008/10/wsat">FF1D-xxxx</wls-wsat:txId><wls-wsat:routing xmlns:wls-wsat="http://weblogic.wsee.wstx.wsat/ws/2008/10/wsat">WLS_xxxx</wls-wsat:routing></ns0:ReferenceParameters></ns0:EndpointReference> isRemovedFromMap:false

at org.glassfish.transaction.TransactionManagerImplCommon.commit(TransactionManagerImplCommon.java:535)

at org.glassfish.transaction.TransactionManagerImplCommon.commit(TransactionManagerImplCommon.java:529)

...

Caused by: javax.transaction.xa.XAException : Failed state during prepare of WS-AT XAResource:WSATXAResource: xidBEA1-xxxx status:Aborted epr:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

at org.glassfish.transaction.TransactionManagerImplCommon.commit(TransactionManagerImplCommon.java:535)

at org.glassfish.transaction.TransactionManagerImplCommon.commit(TransactionManagerImplCommon.java:529)

...

This was strange because all of the code was dot-to-dot as per the documentation and the data source connection pool was set up with the oracle.jdbc.xa.client.OracleXADataSource driver. It should have worked.

I figured that there had to be some problem with the data source still, so I went looking around. And I didn't have to go far because the Transaction configuration tab revealed the problem.

The "Use XA Data Source Interface" option was not enabled! The fix was of course to enable this option and then restart WebLogic. Once that was done all WS-AT calls worked perfectly.

So the exception message may not have been very intuitive but the fix certainly was. It pays to inspect configuration on the managed server side when using new features that depend on the environment being configured correctly first. Lesson learned - don't assume that all configuration is going to be as expected!

-i