Comments on action & ActionContext

["Steve Capell" <steve.capell@redwahoo.com>]

Dale,

 

One of the things that I thought was confusing / wrong in the 2.0 spec was the mapping of action and action context in the <ThisPartyActionBinding> element.  These elements / attributes are supposed to map to elements in a bpss schema - which, in turn, carries the semantics of the UMM model from which schema have been generated.   That being the case, these values should map to fields of type ID (in the referenced BPSS) so that there can be no ambiguity.  If you look at the bpss specification (v1.1 and draft 2.0), each element binaryCollaboration / Transaction / activity / etc element carries both name and nameID attributes.  Name is just an xsd string whilst nameId is of type ID (ie must be unique in the namespace of the bpss instance).

 

So the CPA action and ActionContext elements and attributes really should of type QName and should map to the nameID elements in the corresponding bpss.  The example instance on page 26 has values for these key reference fields that are clearly just meaningless strings (from a machine readability perspective):

 

                <tp:ActionContext

                    tp:binaryCollaboration="Request Purchase Order"

                    tp:businessTransactionActivity="Request Purchase Order"

                    tp:requestOrResponseAction="Purchase Order Request Action"/>

 

I'd suggest that the cpa should have a namespace declaration at the top that defines the namespace of the bpss instance (eg xmlns:bp=rosettanet-org:processes.3A4.bpss) and then the action attribute and each actionContext attribute should be a QName that links to the corresponding nameId field in the bpss instance.  Something like:

 

BPSS INSTANCE

********************

 

<ProcessSpecification

     targetNamespace=rosettanet-org:processes.pip3A4

     xmlns:tns=rosettanet-org:processes.pip3A4

......

<BinaryCollaboration

     name="Request Purchase Order"

     nameId="order.request"

 

CPA INSTANCE

*******************

 

<tp:CollaborationProtocolAgreement

        xmlns:bp=rosettanet-org:processes.pip3A4

....

<tp:ActionContext

      tp:binaryCollaboration="bp:order.request"

      etc...

 

 

Without this level of precision, the architecure begins to crumble....

 

Regards,

 

Steve Capell

Red Wahoo Pty Ltd

+61 410 437854

 

 

---

From: Dale Moberg [mailto:dmoberg@cyclonecommerce.com]
Sent: Thursday, 28 October 2004 8:27 AM
To: ebxml-cppa@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [ebxml-cppa] OASIS ebXML CPPA core maintenance draft (2.1) and schema

Hi,

 

Nov 12 we can begin to discuss aspects of the 2.1 maintenance release.

 

The main missing elements are the SOAP header and module descriptions.

 

The WSDL extensions need some final changes.

 

BPSS and Messaging 3.0 may give us some reasons to modify Action, Service, Role and Action Context.

 

In the hope of letting you look over these sections I am posting an editor’s draft.

 

This draft should include all the errata we have noted so far.

 

The examples for alternative messaging, wsdl, and soap support are preliminary.

 

I will be traveling next week so I won’t have time to edit too much until Nov 9. If you notice something let me know and I will start an issues list on the draft.

 

Thanks,

 

Dale Moberg

 

PS The appendices are getting numbered consecutively with the main sections. I will find out how to change this eventually, but there will be appendices similar to the 2.0 version.