Issue with UUID's for Core Components and BIE's

[Duane Nickull <dnickull@adobe.com>]

Apologize for the cross post in advance, but I feel both of these groups 
need to address this issue.

The Core Components and Registry specs both mandate a unique identifier 
to be used in certain places.  IN the registry, it is for every single 
registry object.  Each Core Component also must have an identifier.  

In a recent project I did, I decided to use the registry UUID format for 
the Core Components.  That is the DCE 128 bit algorithm for generating 
UUID's.  We also demonstrated programmatic access to the registry to 
retrieve copies of Core Components, slurped them into a context assembly 
utility along with an XML declaration of the 8 context categories and 
values representing a specific set of contexts, and spat our several 
BIE's, which were aggregated onto an XML schema.  The good news is that 
all went well and the system works perfect.

There were some questions however that do need further discussion IMO.

1. Should a BIE carry the same UUID as the Core Component it was derived 
from?

2. Either in addition to, or alternatively to #1, should a BIE carry 
its' own unique UUID?  If it is placed into a registry, the UUID will be 
assigned to it by the registry, but it also need to be serialized inline 
into the BIE to be used outside of the registry or in places where 
access to the Registry RIM instance data is not possible. (real world 
use cases exist for this).

3. If the BIE does have to have it's own UUID, possibly in addition to 
the COre COmponents UUID, should this UUID be in the 128 bit algorithm 
format OR should it use something akin to the UDEF format that can 
convey context variables?  This may be crucial to aid business mappers 
and integration software (rich client applications) to map the BIE to 
existing data sources.

Thank you for any comments on this.  I have done it one way but would 
like to not reply with what I have done until I hear ideas from others 
since I am not happy with my solution.

Duane

-- 
Senior Standards Strategist
Adobe Systems, Inc.
http://www.adobe.com