RE: [tamie] Event Board

["Durand, Jacques R." <JDurand@us.fujitsu.com>]

Cho and all:

 

We will put this on the agenda for this Tuesday Feb 3rd meeting.

 

Some comments:

 

1- I have the feeling that one type of EB over these 3 types (PEB, MEB, TEB) might be superfluous... in particular: can't we consider PEB and MEB the same?

Or is the "MEB" acting only as an event input (fed by the event adapters) and PEB as only for outputs from scripts, like test results, etc.?

 

2- could we make a list of various kinds of events we need to manage so that we better understand the requirements we must address?

(e1). External events  that contain business data, e.g. Purchase Order, and that needs to be processed usually within "conversations". e.g. all events relating to the same POref#.

(e2). Internal events generated by test scripts just for the sake of synchronization across "scriplets" (or "testflows"). Need to be discarded at the end of a test case execution

(e3).  Internal Events that capture the result of test case exec. Need to persist beyond test case execution time.

(e4). External events that represent some status notification about business environment, e.g. a server is down: need be shared by all test case scripts.

(e5). Etc...

 

3- Could there be some E.Boards that do not fall into these categories: PEB, MEB, TEB ?

An event Board is I believe similar to Event Stream (see EPTS glossary). That suggests that the flow of incoming events as converted by the Event Adapter, could be split into several smaller event streams (like evt queues or topics), each one of these event streams (i.e. smaller Event Board) being consumed by a different test case instance, e.g. event stream for a single Purchase Order. Such an EB is not necessarily "temporary"... could be just a subset of a larger persistent Event Board, like a "view" on a common EB. So isn't such an EB outside any of these categories: PEB, MEB, TEB ?

 

And happy lunar year too (and here is a question from an ignorant: how many of these lunar years in a "solar" year ??? :-)

 

-Jacques

---

From: Hyunbo Cho [mailto:hcho@postech.ac.kr]
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 7:02 AM
To: tamie@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: 'Jungyub Woo'; 'gazuo'
Subject: [tamie] Event Board

Happy new lunar year!

 

Here is modified description (requirements) on Event Board Management that Jacques emailed on 1/22/2009. Again discussion has been made with Dr. Jungyub Woo at NIST and Mr. Yunsoo Lee at Torpedo.

 

-Cho

 

---------------------------

 

1. Functionality of Event Adaptor (EA)

 

- to send Events out to the external entities (for the request of Monitor)

 

- to receive Events from the external entities

 

- to mediate external events into Events that have proper structure for eTSM processing. E.g. they transform B2B messages into eTSM xml Events. They are acting as Event Sources (per the EPTS terminology).

 

- to post Events to Main Event Board (MEV)

 

Note 1) Since EA does not post outgoing Events, Monitor should do so if necessary.

 

Note 2) If there is a need to separate event flows based on their source and not based on their content (e.g. different companies testing their own B2B platform which generate similar events) , then Company A and B will send their events to different event adapters (EA-A and EA-B). In a fully separated event processing, these adapters will feed events to two different EBs, which will in turn be consumed by separate eTSM engines.

 

2. Functionality of Evaluation Adaptor (EVA)

 

- to call external evaluation engines and return the outcomes to Monitor

 

Note 1) since EVA does not post evaluation outcomes, Monitor should do so if necessary

 

3. Event Boards management:

 

- Event Board consists of Main Event Board (MEB), Temporary Event Board (TEB), and Permanent Event Board (PEB).

 

- A test script must know about EBs, can declare and create some, or reference existing PEBs. MEB and TEB may be deleted after the execution of the associated Test Case is stopped. However PEB is stored which can be used for the purpose of deferred test.

 

Note 1) we can assume that EV management can be done within a test script except for deletion of PEV. PEV can exist permanently unless requested by the test user.

 

- Monitor can read and write all Event Boards.

 

- Event Adaptor can post the incoming events to only Main Event Board. Monitor can also post Events to only Main Event Board. Therefore all the Events could be in the MEB, represented by a proper index (e.g. database index).

 

- TEB can be used for efficiency reason. Test scripts will need to deal with "small" event boards (or "Event Streams" per the EPTS terminology). In this case, a subset of Events can be separate from MEV and stored to TEB. For example, there could be an event board for each PurchaseOrder event, collecting all events related to this PO - i.e. sharing the same POref #.

 

- a Test script should be able to work on different EBs in a generic way. E.g. a Test Case verifying that PO exchanges are conform to spec, must be able to work on a different EB at each invocation (e.g. depending on the PO ref #). The CATCH operator must be designed so that it can reference an EB in a parametrized way. For example, all EBs that collect events related to the same PO ref #, wil have an identifier of the form "POtrack:ref123" where the first part "POtrack" is a class of EBs (here the class of all EBs that track PO-related events), and second part "ref123" is a particular PO ref #. The Test script that verifies a single PO exchange will have a CATCH statement of the form: <catch ebclass="POtrack", ebinst="myPO/@ref">, or something equivalent.