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  • 1.  TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 11, 2022 06:44
    Some products need a Party (or PartyRole) attached to is (as RelatedParty), and /or a Place.
    The fact that the Products derived from a ProductOffering or ProductSpecification need a RelatedParty or a Place should be defined in the Product Catalog.
    Can you describe how this could be modelled in TMF620?

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    Lutz Bettge
    Deutsche Telekom AG
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  • 2.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 12, 2022 06:28
    Edited by Matthieu Hattab Jul 12, 2022 06:37
    Hi,

    Do you an example of Party role that is relevant for the Product ABE that should be defined in the Product Offering ABE?
    Party roles for the Product ABE should not be defined in the Product Offering ABE.
    We should use party roles associated with a product specification.
    => TMF620 already supports that.

    Some Party roles (like customer-related roles, payer, user, legal owner etc) should only be set by TMF637, not by TMF620.

    However if you still need partyrole at Product Offering or at Place level, then you can extend the API. Your best guide would be to follow the SID or follow how party roles have been modelled for PS in TMF620.

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    Kind regards,

    Matthieu Hattab
    Lyse Platform
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  • 3.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 12, 2022 06:57
    This is a misunderstanding,
    we do not need a Party/PartyRole on the ProductOffering, but only the statement that the Products of this Offering need a Party in a specific role;
    e.g. so that a sales portal knows that for the given Product (instance of the ProductOffering or ProductSpecification) it needs to ask the business customer (Organization) for the name of e.g. his technical expert.
    Similarly, we need to express in the catalog that for specific Products the portal needs to ask for an address, whereas for other products this is not needed.
    Is there any means to express such things in the catalog?
    Thank you,
    Lutz

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    Lutz Bettge
    Deutsche Telekom AG
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  • 4.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 13, 2022 08:04
    I just noted that there exists a Early Adoption/Beta for PartyRoleManagement API, which adds PartyRoleSpecification.
    So the solution would be to have a PartyRoleSpecificationRef attached to the ProductOffering (or ProductSpecification).
    Would it make sense to extend the ProductCatalog API in the next version?

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    Lutz Bettge
    Deutsche Telekom AG
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  • 5.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 13, 2022 10:28
    you wrote:
    • "the solution would be to have a PartyRoleSpecificationRef attached to the ProductOffering (or ProductSpecification)."
    • "we do not need a Party/PartyRole on the ProductOffering"
    I read these as contradictory statements. a Partyrole or a PartyrolespecRef attached to the PO/PS are pretty much the same thing.

    I think your other message [we need]"The statement that the Products of this Offering need a Party in a specific role" make much more sense.
    The solution I immediately think of are using the  PolicyRule ABE to express your business rule statement.
    Such Policy would then be consumed, at runtime, by a BRMS to validate the Product Order during the Sales process and just before order is submitted.
    Within the strict realms of TMF620, you could also create a productSpec with required characteristics and/or use a PS relationship with the appropriate "relationshipType".
    I would prefer PolicyRule though.It's a more relevant and elegant solution.
    Policy will be added in the next version of the API. 
    but I don't know if policy is only for POP (as I suspect) or also for PO/PS

    As for the question about the address:
    They are several approached but I'll just recommend TM Forum approved recommendation. I don't remember where it is (you could search TMF wiki page) but the solution is simple and valid for a variety of address needs (shipping, delivery/service/termination point).
    the recommendation is to create a dedicated PS and use the various adress fields as characteristics.
    One such example is provided in GB922 product (SID) for shipping address.

    This seems to me the better approach as it is zero development, 100% reusable, and you can bundle the AddressSPEC PS with any other PS and associate it with the PO that has such need.

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    Kind regards,

    Matthieu Hattab
    Lyse Platform
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  • 6.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 14, 2022 03:07
    Hello Matthieu,
    apparantly I misunderstand the Entity/Specification Pattern?

    You say "a Partyrole or a PartyrolespecRef ... are pretty much the same thing".

    My understanding is that a PartyRole attached to some object (e.g. a PO or PS) denotes which person/organization (via its "engagedParty" reference to an actual Party) takes that role for that object. In case of a PO, this might be e.g. Peter, the project manager responsible for the PO.

    In contrast, a PartyRoleSpecification attached to e.g. a PS denotes that for the Products derived from the PS a PartyRole (plus Party) is needed in that particular role. So the actual Person would not be attached to the PS, but to its Products. E.g. we can denote on the PS that a customer that purchases an instanbce of that PS (i.e. a Product) needs a technician to operate the product.

    Is this wrong?

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    Lutz Bettge
    Deutsche Telekom AG
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  • 7.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 14, 2022 05:58
    Let's hope one of the many 620 API authors can participate to this discussion and help us further.
    There are multiple changes discussed for 620 in their wiki project and you can also discuss with them through the wiki or Confluence comments.

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    Kind regards,

    Matthieu Hattab
    Lyse Platform
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  • 8.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 18, 2022 05:55
    Hi Lutz and Matthieu

    Some very good discussions here.

    You have together highlighted a limitation in the catalog (specification) and instance pattern. Namely, that the entity specification defines how the entity instance shall appear in terms of instance characteristics (and relationships to other entities of the same type). However, the specification does not prescribe how to populate strongly-typed attributes and relationships in the instance.
    So, taking Product (inventory TMF637) as an example, the product catalog (TMF620) prescribes how to populate Product.productCharacteristic, Product.product, Product.productPrice, Product.productTerm, and more. But there is no prescription for some of the other attributes and relationships, such as Product.place, Product.relatedParty, etc.

    Perhaps an approach would be to extend ProductSpecification to add strongly-typed indications that "mirror" and relate to the instance attributes and relations. For example: ProductSpecification.placeRequired (values mandatory, optional, irrelevant) and (as suggested above ) ProductSpecification.relatedPartySpec

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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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  • 9.  RE: TMF620 Products that need a party(role) and/or address

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 18, 2022 07:46
    Thank you, Jonathan,
    this shows us that we are not completely thinking in the wrong direction ;-)
    What needs to be done to bring this idea forward to include it in the next release?
    Can we support there?
    Cheers,
    Lutz

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    Lutz Bettge
    Deutsche Telekom AG
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