Hi Jonathan,
I completely agree with you that there are use cases where we need to query the Product and Subscriber details based on the Service. Most common of them are Assurance related use cases. eg: if there is a Fibre Cut, we need to know who are the customers that are impacted and send a notification to them about the service disruption.
In my opinion, we should have a single source of truth where we manage these relationships and query that for all use cases irrespective of the directionality of the request. This will avoid the potential problem of having discrepancies between systems that are managing the links in each direction. This relationship is maintained in the Product Inventory using the
realizingService Relationship
Instead of storing the reverse relationship in Service Inventory and then ending up in all kind of synchronisation issues to maintain this relationship in both places, I think TMF637 Product Inventory API should expose the filter criteria so that TMF637 GET Product can be used to look for the Products that are realized with a given Service or a Resource. In TMF API spec, attribute selection is enabled for all first level attributes.But filtering on sub-resources may be available depending on the compliance level supported by an implementation. It would require the Product Inventory implementation to have additional indexes for quick querying of the Products based on the
realizingService but it would save us from all the complexities and potential problems of maintaining directional relationships at 2 places in the architecture.
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Kinshuk Kulshreshtha
Oracle Corporation
My views posted on this forum are personal, and do not reflect the position of my employer or TM Forum.
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Original Message:
Sent: Jul 28, 2021 14:40
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Integration COM - SOM using TMF Open API - Does Product Inventory have to persist references to Service Inventory items?
On the other hand, one could argue that a link in the other direction, from Service to Product, and from Resource to Service/Product, would also be very useful. If a service problem is detected, I can use this link to find out which products are impacted and perhaps proactively warn the customer/product user.
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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.
Original Message:
Sent: Jul 28, 2021 10:00
From: Bozidar Pasagic
Subject: Integration COM - SOM using TMF Open API - Does Product Inventory have to persist references to Service Inventory items?
Pasquale having this link between Product Inventory and realizing CFS and Resources will also be beneficial in case management or customer trouble management.
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Bozidar Pasagic
Bell Canada
Original Message:
Sent: Jul 23, 2021 09:57
From: Pasquale Rechichi
Subject: Integration COM - SOM using TMF Open API - Does Product Inventory have to persist references to Service Inventory items?
Hello everyone,
I'm dealing with a BSS transformation project, where it's required to set up a future-proof integration between COM and SOM modules.
Following steps are usually executed upon a customer onboarding request:
- COM will send a request using TMF641 to SOM containing a list of services to be fulfilled (e.g. offers to be activated in charging system, network profile to be enabled, …)
- Once the provisioning is completed SOM will reply to COM with the result (service order status notification) and also the IDs related to the services instantiated inside SR.
Afterwards, assuming the customer wants to amend or remove one of the service previously instantiated, what would be your "preferred" approach, either:
- COM to send directly a reference of the service to be amended/updated --> It implies COM maintains locally a link between commercial offer instance and service instances
- COM to send the commercial offer instance and SOM to look up from service inventory which are the associated services and act on them accordingly.
This is going to be a critical point to be tackled and I would appreciate your feedback.
Regards,
Pas
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Pasquale Rechichi
Ericsson Inc.
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