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  • 1.  TMF620 - Product Catalog Management - ProductOffering relationship

    Posted Oct 05, 2018 02:15
    Hi,

    I'm looking into implementing the Product Catalog Management API R17.5 but some questions arised:

    1.Based on the Product Catalog Management resource model, specifically the Product Offering resource model I was unable to understand how can one relate a ProductOffering with another ProductOffering, when we are not dealing with Bundle Product Offerings. Example:
    Offer A
        Mobile
            Data
                100MB (Billing Offer)
            Voice and messaging
                100SMS (Billing Offer)

    Based on this example how could I relate ProductOffering "Offer A" with ProductOffering "Mobile" and so on?
    I looked into the SID R17.5 and found out that a ProductOffering has an attribute ProductOfferingRelationship. I was also unable to find a document that mapped the SID to the OpenApi Product Catalog Management. So I'm unsure if this relationship behavior is something that is possible but I'm simply not understanding how, or is something that does not make sense to the specification.

    2. Still regarding the ProductOffering resource model, it is possible to observe a relationship between ProductOffering and ProductOfferingPrice. According to the specification one can create a ProductOfferingPrice through the ProductOffering resource, although not all attributes will be exposed.
    How should I look into this ProductOfferingPrice? Should I consider this as a sort of "ProductOfferingPriceRef" where the relationships with Price and PriceAlteration only exist with this "ProductOfferingPriceRef", since the actual "ProductOfferingPrice" model does not have these relationships. Therefore, a new "ProductOfferingPrice" is only created if the ID does not exist. And if it does exist, it references an actual "ProductOfferingPrice".
    Or this "ProductOfferingPrice" is an actual "ProductOfferingPrice" and not a reference? If that is the case, there are clear differences between the model displayed in "ProductOffering resource model" and "ProductOfferingPrice resource model". How should I deal with them? A simple example is the price attribute. In "ProductOffering resource model" the price in ProductOfferingPrice is an object with 4 attributes, but in "ProductOfferingPrice" the price is an object of type money and has 2 attributes.

    If my questions are a bit confusing feel free to ask for clarification.

    Thank you in advance.

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    Pedro Sanches
    Celfocus
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  • 2.  RE: TMF620 - Product Catalog Management - ProductOffering relationship

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Oct 09, 2018 05:57
    Hi Pedro

    Thanks for your feedback.

    Regarding your first point, in release 18.5 we plan to add an offering-to-offering relationship. If you have access to the Open API JIRA you can see the proposal at https://projects.tmforum.org/jira/browse/AP-865. You need to consider what types of relationship are relevant for this (we identified up-sell, cross-sell, and others).

    Regarding your second point, the release 17.5 API contains two flavors of ProductOfferingPrice:
    • Embedded POP (as in earlier releases of the API)
    • Enhanced and stand-alone POP
    The plan is that the embedded POP should be deprecated and will then be replaced by reference to the stand-alone POP. I am not sure if we will do this in release 18.5 or a future release (19.0), since this is a backward compatibility break that will affect existing conformant implementations of the product catalog API.




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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
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  • 3.  RE: TMF620 - Product Catalog Management - ProductOffering relationship

    Posted Oct 10, 2018 04:45
    Hi Jonathan

    Thank you for your answer. I'm glad that these two points were already identified and that they will probably be addressed in further releases.

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    Pedro Sanches
    Celfocus
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  • 4.  RE: TMF620 - Product Catalog Management - ProductOffering relationship

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Nov 26, 2018 09:58
    First I should inform you that due to priority changes we are not making any updates to the Product Catalog Management API in release 18.5. I hope that the changes that we have identified, and additional enhancements (such as Policy for the catalog area) will be done in release 19).

    As to Mihaela's question, as a matter of terminology the model does not use the word Charge as a substitute for Price - in fact I am not sure that the word Charge is used at all in the API model. We can talk of a composite Price that includes a Onetime Price and a Recurring Price.
    The old ProductOfferingPrice embedded within ProductOffering does not support this at all.
    The new ProductOfferingPrice could support this, where the parent (composite) POP would refer to the atomic POPs using the BundledPOPRelation

    But I advise caution here - in order to support this end-to-end we would need to arrange that also Product Order and Product Inventory APIs should support the composite price model, and they currently do not. Adding @Ludovic Robert, who leads those APIs.

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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
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  • 5.  RE: TMF620 - Product Catalog Management - ProductOffering relationship

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Nov 26, 2018 08:32
    Hi Jonathan

    Regarding your response, I was wondering  how should we send as part of ProductOfferingPrice resource all charges contained by a Composed Product Offering Price?
    More exactly, if we have a price with 2 charges, a one time charge and a recurring charge, should we send them as pop references?  We were thinking  to send them directly embedded in the response, maybe as part of another attribute, but I  don't think we have that option.

    Thanks,

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    Mihaela Bordean
    IBM Corporation
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