Re: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples

[Stephen Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

I'm no expert but I think the SKU identifies products whereas
the serial ID is to identify an instance of a product. I would
likely use SellersItemIdentification/ID initially which could be
some ID other than a SKU but could be a SKU if that is what
the seller uses. You could also include something more
specific to an SKU to leave the seller free to use their own
product ID in addition to a SKU if they prefer. As far as I know
the humble SKU isn't universally adopted outside the USA.
Other alternatives seem to be GTIN (in UK, for example),
APN (in Australia), EAN (in Europe and elsewhere) and UPC.
How about using the StandardItemIdentification for the SKU
or EAN? The definition in the schema is
"Associates the item with its identification according to a standard system."
http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/os-UBL-2.0/xsd/common/UBL-CommonAggregateComponents-2.0.xsd
Anything related to the 'class' of the item is found in cac:Item
and anything related to the actual instance of an item is in
cac:ItemInstance (not appropriate for a catalogue unless it is
an item like something unique on eBay, say the original James
Bond underwater Lotus Esprit, presuming there was just one).
ItemInstance contains things like RFIDs and Lot Numbers, as
well as SerialID. These are appropriate for a Despatch Advice,
say. [IMO unfortunately] the sharing of common types means
other documents tend to have to support them too. To see what
a given document type potentially contains easily, I tend to find
it useful to generate an XML example from the document schema
using, say, a tool like Liquid XML or XML Spy (and there are tools
more specific to e-commerce standards like UBL).

By the way, your XML will need other namespaces from UBL as
it needs to prefix things like Item (usually as cac:Item) and like
ID (usually cbc:ID) - but I guess you were leaving those things
out to save time creating a real UBL example. Generating an
example with a decent tool should include all those extra things
like the other namespaces and prefixes and any mandatory fields
and quite improtantly the mandatory values in some of the coded
items (not so many of those in a Catalogue, fortunately).

Otherwise you've got the right idea with the Catalogue I think. It
is one of the UBL documents which could be very complex but only
actually needs to be quite simple in many cases e.g. when used
as a simple price list). If the catalogue has to be stored in a database
then it might be you only want to do updates on individual lines from
time to time - hence the Catalogue line update document type, etc.
Otherwise you might have to replace the whole cataalogue every
time there is a change.

All the best

- Steve





2009/2/9 Alexander Whillas <whillas@gmail.com>:
> OK,
>
> Thanks for the help guys. I'm going to look though all the reference
> material you've mentioned here and see if I can't produce a draft for
> my own customization of the schema. I found the
> UBL-CommonLibrary-2.0.xls file, in the official spec's, very helpful
> (once I realised what it was). Filtering by 'Object Class' has helped
> to build a picture of the whole hierarchy.
>
> So basiclly, if I want to represent a complete Catalogue of products I
> have use the Catalogue Document which will look something like this:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <Catalogue xmlns="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:Catalogue-2">
>        <CatalogueLine>
>                <ID>ABC001</ID>
>                <Item>
>                        <Description>Shirt</Description>
>                        <ItemInstance>
>                                <SerialID>ABC001-SML-BLUE</SerialID>
>                                <AdditionalItemProperty>
>                                        <Name>Size</Name>
>                                        <Value>Small</Value>
>                                </AdditionalItemProperty>
>                                <AdditionalItemProperty>
>                                        <Name>Colour</Name>
>                                        <Value>Blue</Value>
>                                </AdditionalItemProperty>
>                        </ItemInstance>
>                        <ItemInstance>
>                                <SerialID>ABC001-LRG-BLUE</SerialID>
>                                <AdditionalItemProperty>
>                                        <Name>Size</Name>
>                                        <Value>Large</Value>
>                                </AdditionalItemProperty>
>                                <AdditionalItemProperty>
>                                        <Name>Colour</Name>
>                                        <Value>Blue</Value>
>                                </AdditionalItemProperty>
>                        </ItemInstance>
>                </Item>
>        </CatalogueLine>
>        <CatalogueLine>
>                <Item>
>                        <Description>Shirt</Description>
>                        <ItemInstance>
>                                ...
>                        </ItemInstance>
>                        <ItemInstance>
>                                ...
>                        </ItemInstance>
>                </Item>
>        </CatalogueLine>
>        ...
> </Catalogue>
>
> The most retail systems use a SKU to identify the unique combination
> of say Product-Size-Colour. Have I got this right to put it in the
> ItemInstance's SerialID?
>
> Does anything seem glaringly wrong about this?
>
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>



-- 
Stephen D. Green

Document Engineering Services Ltd



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