RE: [obix] The Contract List is Dead, Long live the Contract Element! -

I apologize, I have not been able to get to the WD42 yet. If you want to go ahead with a discussion on WD41 tomorrow, that would be fine. I’m not sure we’ve discussed everything that we had on the queue last week anyway. I hope to at least be able to go over WD41 to be prepared for a discussion, but it would be tonight before I got to it.

I believe Nil & list of URIs was in 1.0, I had not really changed any of that behavior, IIRC.

I’m still not totally sure the contract stuff is right though.

From: William Cox [mailto:wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 11:03 AM
To: obix@lists.oasis-open.org; Gemmill, Craig
Subject: Re: [obix] The Contract List is Dead, Long live the Contract Element! - for WD41

Craig--

I've attached the WD40 diagram dated 20150422 and a work in progress on WD41.

Should I touch up the document now that we've moved toward resolution? Do we need further discussion first?

Does this all work for you? I'm not sure what the 1.0 behavior is; was the list-of-URIs and Nil a 1.1 innovation? Was it in 1.0 or 1.0 extensions?

Here's a partial update to the UML - from reverse-engineering the WD41 schema. Due to oddities in the Enterprise Architect UML tool I have to do some hand updates to the attributes - for example, in Op the attributes will be

in: contract
out: contract

The initialization to Nil in the WD41 XSD is not yet reflected - again has to be manual.

The terminology is

Contract - The relevant agreement for a specific purpose, e.g., for Feed "in" and "of" are of type Contract. The XSD type is String. The string contains one or more URIs separated by spaces. If the initial URI is the string "Nil" the Contract is treated as empty. The initial URI element has special meaning - see section XYZ.

Thanks!

bill
--

William Cox

Email: wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com

Web: http://www.CoxSoftwareArchitects.com

+1 862 485 3696 mobile

On 4/26/15 6:56 PM, Toby Considine wrote:

Much of the conversation since February has been around the confusing and inconsistent use of Contract and ContractList. This is compounded by the “is” and the “of” which are “formatted as a contract list”

As I can best summarize the conclusions:

A ContractElement is an URI.

A contract is a string consisting of 0-to-many space delimited ContractElements.

If a Contract consists of 0 (zero) ContractElements, then by convention it is represented with the reserved string “nil”

There is some language that suggests that the first contract element in a contract has some sort of special or primary value, but it is not yet clear to me precisely what this means.

I believe that this language, and this description, if applied across all the areas of the specification document that use the term “Contract” will remove the last inconsistencies in the specification.

The Schema WD41, recently uploaded, reflects this change.

tc

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

– George Bernard Shaw.

Toby Considine
TC9, Inc.

Toby.Considine@gmail.com
Phone: (919)619-2104

http://www.tc9.com

Chair, OASIS OBIX Technical Committee

Chair, OASIS WS-Calendar Technical Committee

Editor, OASIS Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) Editor, OASIS Energy Interoperation
blog: http://www.NewDaedalus.com

obix message