Re: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples

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

At 2009-02-09 18:09 +0100, Alexander Whillas wrote:
>I joined this list as I'm thinking of using UBL 2.0 to do
>importing/exporting interface to the popular ecommerce software
>Ubercart (www.ubercart.org)

Kewl!

>and was hoping to find some examples of
>how to use UBL for a catalog import (to begin with).

I'll let others comment on catalogues as I haven't used them a lot myself.

>UBL does seem to be huge and a little scary to be frank.

It is that way for a reason, so that UBL can be of use to as many 
different communities as possible.  Communities can create their own 
customizations of UBL, configuring a subset of UBL with only the 
portions they need within the community business practices.

I will have announcements later this week of schema subset 
customization software I'm releasing and probable changes to an 
upcoming UBL training delivery in Europe next month.  It looks like 
I'll be adding UBL customization to the syllabus in March.

As for navigating such a huge specification, I've created 
freely-downloadable hyperlinked HTML reports of all of the UBL 
constructs used within each UBL document (omitting those constructs 
not used by the document).  This makes understanding UBL so much 
easier because you don't see constructs that are not being used for a 
particular document type.

These reports are available here:

   http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/resources/ubl/index.htm#ubl2modelreport

It happens I updated these reports yesterday using the latest version 
of our schema subset customization software.

The reports also available in all languages of the IDD:  Spanish, 
Italian and Japanese.

>i need the basics for doing stock tracking updates and perhaps fill in
>a product catalog (with products [ item?] having 2 attributes such as
>'size' and 'colour'). Is this possible?

Shouldn't be a problem at all ... looking at the 
Crane-UBL2Report-Catalogue-EN.html file, I see the use of a 
CatalogueLine which uses Item.

Item has a child ItemInstance where you can describe 
AdditionalItemProperty facets regarding that item.  Each facet is 
described by a name/value pair.  Looks to me like you could have:

   <Item>
     <Description>Gizmo</Description>
     <ItemInstance>
       <AdditionalItemProperty>
         <Name>Size</Name>
         <Value>Large</Value>
       </AdditionalItemProperty>
       <AdditionalItemProperty>
         <Name>Colour</Name>
         <Value>Blue</Value>
       </AdditionalItemProperty>
     </ItemInstance>
   </Item>

... but I'll let others confirm if that is appropriate or not for the 
semantics of catalogue constructs.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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