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Subject: Re: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples


Hi Stephen.

Thanks for getting back to me on this. Your help is much appreciated!

The SKU is American in origin and since most/popular eCommerce system
online (at the moment) originate in the USA this has sort of become
the "de facto standard", but as its just an identify and has no fixed
formatting constraints it doesn't really matter what you call it. What
I'm really interested in is using it for stock tracking.

For stock tracking I need to keep a record for every combination of a
products attributes (size, colour etc) or AdditionalItemProperty as
UBL calls them. Thus I need an ID at the ItemInstance level and UBL
seems to only have one identifier at that level: SerialID. Is this
correct?

I'll also need to record a stock level for each instance. There
doesn't seem to be anything I can use for this that the ItemInstance
level except, again AdditionalItemProperty?

I put in the name spaces so you might correct me as to what I'll need
there :) I'm on a Mac and the only tool I seem to have been able to
find is Exchanger XML Lite (www.freexmleditor.com) which I think does
some basic validation but I haven't explored how helpful it is if you
give it a .xsd it doesn't know (it does have a UBL 1.0 example
however). Advice on a better editor for Mac would be most welcome.

The mandatory fields might be a problem as they seem to imply the
other documents, which in turn implys the whole UBL (or is ebXML?)
process. At this stage I was just looking for a standards way to
represent the products catalogue (half for stock tracking purposes)
between two systems. The UBL process does seem sensible but I'm only
responsable for one communication in the chain and so the rest of
parts are not applicable or beyond my scope and/or control.

I guess I plan to take only the parts I need and try and comply as
much as possible, within the time constraints of my project. Its a PHP
project and so I really only have to aim for well formed XML not so
much adherence to a strict schema. I guess this is how standards
evolve, hand-to-hand with industry/necessity. If UBL becomes adapted
by other OS platforms, more than my implementation, then I guess
stricter compliance will follow.

The 'ActualDeliveryDate' example is interesting as ActualDeliveryDate
would be a process/time dependant variable which only comes into
existence once the Order has actually been delivered. While the goods
are in the process of being delivered, they still need and Order with
a Delivery type.

regards

alex


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