Trying to understand DocumentReference from an implementer's perspective

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

Fellow UBLers,

I need more implementation guidance, please, regarding 
DocumentStatus, DocumentResponse and DocumentReference.

So, understandably, in a DocumentStatus instance I want to return 
status information about a particular document.  I have a status 
value, I have the UUID that I know is found inside the document, and 
I need to point to the document using a URI.  I want to return those 
three things in a DocumentStatus instance.

In which BBIE do I put that URI?

In the ticket https://issues.oasis-open.org/browse/UBL-168 I posited 
that UBL 2.1 line 677 was incorrectly documented as "an identifier 
for the referenced document" and I based this on column U of the 
model where an example given for the ID is "PO-001":

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/os-UBL-2.1/mod/summary/reports/UBL-AllDocuments-2.1.html#Table_DocumentReference.Details

That example value, and the other one "3333-44-123", both led me to 
believe that the ID is the value transcribed from the document being 
referenced.  And so I argued for the "clarification" of the 
definition to be about the ID that is found.

But now I'm lost regarding where I put a URI that points to my 
document.  If I want to report on the status of a document found at, 
say, http://myCompany.com/docStore/invoices/invoice-1234.xml ... 
where do I put that URI in the document reference?

If the example is wrong and I am supposed to use the ID as the 
*pointer* to the referenced document, then the original definition is 
correct.  And if the original definition is correct, then the UUID is 
not necessarily the UUID of the referenced document, it could very 
well be (somehow?) a UUID of this ABIE that is the document 
reference.  That seems really weird to me, so perhaps it is supposed 
to be the UUID from the referenced document and is documented 
wrong.  I'm back to being confused.

And I still cannot make sense of the definition for row 684 XPath:

"A reference to another place in the same XML document instance in 
which DocumentReference appears."

... because the document reference is appearing right there in the 
same document with the XPath BBIE ... not the document being referenced.

Anyway ... Jon was very right to question what I was doing with 
"clarifying" the definitions.  I'm now thinking I was way off on a 
tangent, yet nobody could see that I had arrived in such an errant 
state.  Mea culpa.

So I'm proposing we postpone ticket 168 until we consider changes for 
2.3 and we consider how to define these constructs so that users are 
not as confused as I am.

Meanwhile, can someone please guide me where in a DocumentStatus 
document I am supposed to put the URI to the document I'm reporting 
the status of?

Thank you for any help you can be.

. . . . . . Ken

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