Open APIs

Greetings,

Our BSS follows the SID model, and we are currently in the process of certifying several Open APIs. During this, I have encountered challenges that require resolution.

Question 1: 

I am currently focused on the Party Management API, following the Conformance profile (RAND) for v5.0.0.

The challenge lies in the POST operation for individuals, which mandates three attributes: familyName, givenName, and @type.

However, as per SID, certain relations, such as the IndividualIdentification object, are mandatory. This implies that, according to SID, creating an Individual necessitates the creation of IndividualIdentification.

how to address this within the Party Management API. If IndividualIdentification is made mandatory, it will result in test failures if not provided in the request. Conversely, if it is not made mandatory, it will lead to the failure of individual creation in alignment with the SID model.

Questions 2:

I found two version in the open API table

• Party Management API  v5.0.0
• Party Management API  v4.0.0

However, the publication date for v4.0.0 is later than v5.0.0, is this a mistake?  it is the same for all APIs which has two versions on production.

Any pieces of advice will be much appreciated.

Best regards,

------------------------------
Ahmed Elbanna
Sigma EMEA
------------------------------

Hi Ahmed

I think you can safely ignore the publication dates in the open api table. All the v5 APIs (about 20) in the table were issued around mid-September 2023, in advance of the TMF DTW conference.

Regarding your note about variance between the Open API and the SID model, that's a great question. The Open API model is of course conceptually derived from the SID, but with changes based on practicalities. For example the SID model is very fine-grained in terms of numbers of classes, but very sparse in properties/attributes. The Open API has "flattened" and denormalized many of the SID hierarchies into a single or a few entities, but with many more attributes based on real-life experience use of the APIs.

In the API model, we prefer to be permissive rather than prescriptive - so in your example of the mandatory individual identification, the API designers presumably took the view that not every individual recognized by the service provider needs to prove their identity. It would depend on business practices and local regulations. I have no idea why the SID made this mandatory, to me this seems an unreasonably restrictive modeling decision.

Hope it helps

------------------------------
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.
------------------------------