ubl — archive

[Jon Bosak]

UBL TC MINUTES FOR TUESDAY 15 AUGUST 2006 Members attending in person: Jon Bosak (chair) Mavis Cournane Mike Grimley G. Ken Holman Andy Schoka Paul Thorpe Members attending by phone: Tim McGrath (vice chair) The phone was open from about 09:15 to 11:25 and will be open again tomorrow (Wednesday) starting about the same time. Issue review TM recorded all the results of this in the issues spreadsheet, so these are just the high-level bits: - Issues 15, 23, and 29 are possibly errors that will have to be corrected before release. ISS-29: Simple copying error; must talk about this Wednesday [but note that 29 seems to have been resolved; see below]. ISS-23: It appears that EF is enforcing a CCTS rule (truncations of DENs are not allowed when qualifiers are present) and that therefore the spreadsheets should be corrected to fit the schemas. ISS-15: Appears to be a real inconsistency that may have to be corrected. ISS-11 also looks like it might need correcting. - We covered ISS-1 through ISS-15 as well as ISS-25 and ISS-26 (as side effects) with results recorded in the revised issues list. We will resume tomorrow with ISS-16. UBLVersion revisited GKH joined us in the afternoon, prompting a continuation of yesterday's discussion of UBLVersion. We eventually came to a general agreement on the following two points. 1. It's an error to think of UBLVersion as a report about the system generating the instance, because a "UBL 2.7 system" is still perfectly capable of generating an instance that uses elements defined no later than 2.3, say (and in an environment with lots of different trading partners, this will not be unusual). Rather, the value of the UBLVersion element (if it has a value) is a claim by the originating system that the instance will validate against any UBL schema whose minor version number (within the indicated major range) is equal to or greater than the value given by UBLVersion. So a UBLVersion value of 2.3, for example, does not mean "I come from a UBL 2.3 system" but rather "I claim to be valid against any UBL schema from release 2.3 up to the latest major version 2 release" (because we define a minor version update as one that adds only optional elements). Or, to put it another way, it says "I guarantee that you will find no elements in here defined later than the ones found in version 2.3." The same applies to the elements for profile version and subset version. It should be noted that the version number when applied to a receiving system means something different. The expression "a UBL 2.3 system" means (or should mean) "a system that's been set up to validate incoming instances against a UBL 2.3 schema." 2. In light of this, we identified the following two strategies for providing the desired functionality. A. Create processing instructions to hold the values of schema, profile, and subset version, and add an eighth instance rule to specify their position in the document. This is the alternative favored by the group, but we suspect that the unfamiliarity of the construct may cause anxiety among users (or rather fears by vendors of anxiety among users). B. Make the three version elements optional, with no default or fixed values and no value constraints. We note that option C requires no substantive change to the current schemas (though it might be a good idea to revise the definitions of these elements). This is the alternative recommended by the group meeting in Montr�al. Jon