Architecture Management Topic: Resource Type Discovery

Owner: Jim Conallen

As AM service providers offer customer defined resource types it would be useful for clients to be able to find out exactly what types of resources a provider manages, as well as allow the creation of. Presently a client must navigate all the service discovery documents looking at all creation and query services and the resource type and shapes associated with them. It is not clear how a client would know that a provider can manage a given type outside of creation/query.

Scenario

An organization uses multiple OSLC providers to manage architecture resources. Each AM provider manages many different types of resources, some of which may be custom defined.

A client wants to create and start working with a particular type of resources, or determine which types of resources it can manage so as to provide the user with a list of resource types they can choose from.

The client goes to each service provider, walks the service catalog and provider documents. It examines each service provider document an looks at all the query base and creation factory services defined in it. For each of these it collects the resource shapes and resource types associated with it. The client now has a map of all the publically declared resource types that the provider manages.

This scenario requires that the provider document all resources that it can manage as resource shapes associated with query base or creation factories (often the same url).

Issues

Are we versionon types? If so, how does a client know which version of a resource type/shape they use?

Can a service provider manage a resource type that does not have either a query base or creation factory? What about resource types that are independent resources, but never created directly, only indirectly.

For custom (dynamically defined) resource types is the expectation that each one will have its own query base and creation factory?