Change Management Service Description

1.0 SPECIFICATION

Introduction

Clients with a need to interact with a Change Management system need a mechanism for discovering its capabilities, and the URLs used to access those capabilities. There are several aspects to the discovery process. First, clients may need to discover the existence of the Change Management system itself. Once discovering that, clients will want to discover the contexts in which change requests may exist, often referred to as projects or user databases. Once identifying a context, the clients need to discover the services that are provided within that context. This portion of the OSLC CM spec addresses the latter two of these scenarios, leaving the discovery of the CM system itself to either manual configuration or a broader network configuration mechanism. Therefore, this spec focuses on how clients will discover a context (or project), the service document associated with that context, and the format of that document.

Notation and Conventions

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119. Domain name examples use RFC2606.

Terminology

Service Description Resource - an informational resource describing the capabilities and contextual configuration needed for a set of change management-specific services.

Service Description Document - the representation of a Change Management Services Resource.

Service Provider - an implementation of the OSLC Change Management specifications as a server. OSLC CM clients consume these services

Sevice Discovery

Starting with a single entry point to a service provider {base-url}, clients will discover the (typically hierarchical) arrangement of contexts managed by the application. To support the wide range of application and project configurations, OSLC is not specifying a predetermined arrangement of these contexts. Instead, clients will be able to iterate through a group of collections (Service Provider Catalogs) until identifying a context of interest, where the client will find a CM service description document.

The figure below illustrates a simple interaction where there is only one set of choices and then configuration has been completed

The dicovery model flow is as follows:

1. Request information from an OSLC CM based service provider: GET {url}
2. If Response is a Service Provider Catalog:
   1. An entry is selected from the Service Provider Catalog
   2. With this entry's {url}, repeat to step #1
3. If Response is a Service Description Document, then continue to next step
4. Configuration has completed

The number of iterations over the configuration choices should be set by the client application. Typical configurations should not need more than 2 levels of configuration context, so a limit of 5 is recommended.

Termination of the discover occurs when a the client application receives an HTTP response with a Content-Type of application/x-oslc-cm-service-description+xml and the service description document as the response's content body.

Service Description Resource

A Service Description Resource is an informational resource describing a the contextual configuration needs of a service provider.

The GET method on a Service Description Resource MUST retrieve a Service Description Document. This specification only covers retrieving a Service Description Resource with GET. The behavior of POST, PUT, and DELETE methods on Service Description Resources are not covered in this specification.

Service Description Document

The Service Description Document provides configuration definitions needed by consumers of a service provider.

The Service Description Document MUST be indentified using the media type of application/x-oslc-cm-service-description+xml.

XML namespace abbreviations used in this specification:

• rdf - RDF XML namespace - http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
• dc - The Dublin Core Metadata Terms namespace - http://purl.org/dc/terms/
• oslc_cm - The Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration Change Management namespace - http://open-services.net/xmlns/cm/1.0 /

Providers of this Service Description Document MAY provide additional properties in a non-OSLC namespace.

Presentable text is intended to be seen by users of the client application communicating with the provider of this service. Presentable text, as indicated in the table above, can have multiple entries per translated language supported. The language of each presentable text string will be indicated with the xml:lang attribute.

Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oslc_cm:ServiceDescriptor 
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
  xmlns:oslc_cm="http://open-services.net/xmlns/cm/1.0/" 

  rdf:about="http://example.com/bugs/service-descriptor.xml">

  <dc:title>Project X</dc:title>
  <dc:description>My Product Name's OSLC CM Service Description for Project X.</dc:description>
  <dc:contributor>
    <dc:title>My Company Name, My CM Product</dc:title>
    <dc:identifier>com.mycompany.myproduct</dc:identifier>
    <oslc_cm:icon>../icons/myprod.ico</oslc_cm:icon>
  </dc:contributor>
  
  <oslc_cm:changeRequests version="1.0">
    <!-- Resource creation factory URL -->
    <oslc_cm:factory oslc_cm:default="true">
      <dc:title>Location for creation of bugs</dc:title>
      <oslc_cm:url>./bug</oslc_cm:url>
    </oslc_cm:factory>

    <!-- Alternate resource creation factory URL -->
    <oslc_cm:factory>
      <dc:title>Location for creation of *HIGH PRIORITY* bugs</dc:title>
      <oslc_cm:url>./bug?priority=High</oslc_cm:url>
    </oslc_cm:factory>
  
    <!-- Simple GET-based URL-encoded query -->    
    <oslc_cm:simpleQuery>
      <dc:title>Simple GET-based Bug Query</dc:title>
      <oslc_cm:url>./bugsquery</oslc_cm:url>
    </oslc_cm:simpleQuery>
    
    <!-- Resource Selection Dialog -->
    <oslc_cm:selectionDialog oslc_cm:hintWidth="740px" oslc_cm:hintHeight="480px">
      <dc:title>Web Dialog for finding and selecting bugs.</dc:title>
      <oslc_cm:url>./ui/resourcePicker</oslc_cm:url>
    </oslc_cm:selectionDialog>

    <!-- Resource Creation Dialog -->
    <oslc_cm:creationDialog oslc_cm:hintWidth="600px" oslc_cm:hintHeight="320px">
      <dc:title>Bug Submit Dialog for creating bugs.</dc:title>
      <oslc_cm:label>Bug</oslc_cm:label>
      <oslc_cm:url>./ui/submitDialog</oslc_cm:url>
    </oslc_cm:creationDialog>
  </oslc_cm:changeRequests>
  
</oslc_cm:ServiceDescriptor>

References

• OpenSearch 1.1
• W3C XML 1.0 - xml:lang
• Dublin Core Metadata Terms