name and nameID attributes on choreography/flow constructs

Hima pointed out to me that except for the Transition element, each control construct has a name attribute group in its type.

So Fork, Join, Decision as well as Start, Success and Stop all have to have name and nameID values.

I agree with Hima that we probably need to make a uniform stylistic decision.

I am not aware that there is any good use case anymore for needing to refer to what used to be called the “pseudostates”.

The well-formedness constraints on what types of elements IDREFs can refer to generally prevent referring to these states.

A no-op process (with no real states) could be formed by letting a Start state reference Success termination. That is not a very useful use case, however.

I am willing to leave names and nameIDs in if people think they might be useful. If we do that, I would prefer to add the name attribute group to Transition, just to make it easier to always do the same thing.

I am also willing to remove the name attribute group from all these states (which leaves me less comfortable somehow).

For fewest changes, we can add the attribute group to Transition, even though these things are less than first-class entities.

We can either remove them all during our TC review or when we update the version to 2.1 or 3.0.

Finally, we could introduce a second attribute name group, just like our current one, except making the attributes optional. That might be the best way to allow their use if and when needed but not to clutter the notation with a lot of attributes that are infrequently used.

Actually I like that last solution the best. I would like to see some +1s before doing this as it seems slightly more than mere editorial.

Dale Moberg

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