It would be good to have a map, but we have no such construct in calling a stored procedure. The best you can do is have default values for parameters and used the named parameter calling syntax. In a system function we could have whatever syntax we want, but then we have the problem of how to encapsulate the connection information (base url, username/password, ws-security, etc.). The request document is always put together by the user (which may be assisted by tooling). Only in the case of http are we trying to force fit the query string to be a document. For SOAP you would just provide the message body. The proposed document for http is probably too restrictive since the parameters names would need to be valid element names. The other considerations are really along the lines of offering better/explicit syntax that would be especially suited for rest - clob http('url', 'path' [, querystring(expr [as name], ...)] [header(expr [as name], ...)] [GET|(POST [expr])|...]) but you still like to have username/password, url, and even details of https handling (which is not even currently handled in the ws resource adapter) encapsulated outside of the vdb so that it could change per environment. As a side note, I'm not sure what the previous use-case was, but allowing the user to pass in the endpoint address seems like a leaky abstraction. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ramesh Reddy" <rareddy(a)redhat.com&gt; To: "Steven Hawkins" <shawkins(a)redhat.com&gt; Cc: "teiid-dev" <teiid-dev(a)lists.jboss.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, June 8, 2010 7:57:57 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central Subject: Re: [teiid-dev] what should a translator-ws look like? This is similar approach you have taken with the File translator, so looks good. I would rather like to see generic map kind of parameter with known keys for the "endpoint" and "soapaction", that we way if there are any other headers we need to add then it will stay the same. In this new calling semantics, who is putting together the request (for soap) document? The engine? or the user's transformation? I am little confused about flow of things from before. If requests always came in the form <params><param_name>.. and translator converted them to soap or http requests, then it makes sense to me. I do not think I follow your comments in other considerations. Can you give some examples. Thanks Ramesh.. On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 16:15 -0400, Steven Hawkins wrote: