Hi Reet
You have asked an excellent question.
Broadly speaking, ServiceCandidate and ResourceCandidate model exposure of Service or Resource Specifications in a particular Service or Resource Catalog. The concept of Candidate is indeed only relevant if you have multiple catalogs.
But it is not clear to me what the added value is, given that the Candidate=>Specification relationship is 1 (or more accurately 0..1), and there are no attributes with significant business meaning in the Candidate. Some weeks ago I raised change requests on the Open API and on the SID to completely remove the Candidate concepts from Service and Resource. If you have access to the Frameworx and Open API JIRA repositories you can see these CRs FX-872 and AP-1382. Of course I cannot say whether these CRs will be accepted or rejected.
In any case, with the current model as-is, the idea is that the product catalog is expected to know both at offering and specification level which services and resources implement the product:
- At product offering level this is done by referring to the service/resource candidate
- At product spec level this is done by the referring to the actual service/resource specification
Clearly the catalog implementor must ensure consistency, so when authoring the catalog she must take care to ensure that the referred service candidate corresponds to the referred service spec (for example).
Hope it helps
Hope it helps
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Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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Original Message:
Sent: Oct 28, 2019 05:43
From: Reet Meier
Subject: TMF_620 Product Catalog Management API Service/Resource Candidate meaning
Hi,
I would like to understand the Service Candidate/Resource candidate meaning, use and relations.
- Product Offering may have 0..1 Service Candidate/ 0..1 Resource candidate;
- Service candidate may have 1 CFSSpec- the service specification implied by this candidate;
- ProductSpecification resource may have 0..n Service Specifications.
ServiceCandidate is an entity that makes a ServiceSpecification available to a catalog.
ProductOffering via productSpecification(also under composite PS hierarchy) is usually related to more than 1 service specification. What does this parallel relation via product offering mean and in which processes is service candidate used?
From thread <https://engage.tmforum.org/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?GroupId=31&MessageKey=d61702fa-44c0-47bb-9fe3-34a3103ea86c&CommunityKey=d543b8ba-9d3a-4121-85ce-5b68e6c31ce5&tab=digestviewer&ReturnUrl=%2fcommunities%2fcommunity-home%2fdigestviewer%3fcommunitykey%3dd543b8ba-9d3a-4121-85ce-5b68e6c31ce5%26tab%3ddigestviewer>
"It is also recommended to map one instance of a ProductSpecification to only one instance of CFSS (which can be a composite of multiple CFSSes according to the composite pattern)."
So if we have to decide in our technical solution integration do we allow only 1 or also many CFSSpecs related to ProductsSpecification what will be the recommendation?
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Kind regards
Reet Meier
Telia Eesti AS
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