CORBA24 — servant_to_id versus servant_to_reference

This operation requires the USE_DEFAULT_SERVANT policy or a
combination of the RETAIN policy and either the UNIQUE_ID or
IMPLICIT_ACTIVATION policies; if not present, the WrongPolicy
exception is raised.

Note that there is nothing conditional here. If these policies are not
present, the operation raises an exception.

Compare this with servant_to_reference:

This operation requires the RETAIN policy and either the
UNIQUE_ID or IMPLICIT_ACTIVATION policies if invoked outside
the context of an operation dispatched by this POA.

Note that, in this case, we have a qualification:

"... if invoked outside the context of an operation..."

Why the difference between the two? They almost do the same thing, namely,
map from a servant to an object ID. It's just that servant_to_reference,
after it has the object ID, also embeds that object ID in a reference.

So, shouldn't the two operations behave the same way? In particular,
why should servant_to_id raise an exception if I call it from within the
context of an executing operation on the specified servant?

In other words, it seems that the behavior specified for servant_to_reference
is correct and should apply equally to servant_to_id. In effect, calling
the operation from withing an executing operation on the specified servant
should do the same thing as calling get_object_id on the POA Current and
use the resulting id.

Am I missing something?

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