[Oslc-Automation] Action resources - implementation patterns

[Martin P Pain]

Attached is my proposed changes to the Action resources 2.0 spec, to split 
out the definition of "interaction patterns" from "implementation 
profiles".

I think this simplifies things, so that consumers that wish to implement 
understanding of everything can implement all interaction patterns without 
being concerned with implementation profiles at all (e.g. the restrictions 
on the profile use by CM about the requestURI must be the request of the 
action), and it simplifies the idea of interaction patterns extending 
other interaction patterns.

It allowed me to address the question of "how do you identify the 
interaction pattern in use" without having to identify the implementation 
profile in use, which would be harder as they may (in the CM case) contain 
other restrictions.


My changes are done using "track changes" in the attached doc, and consist 
of:

* An introduction to actions for people who don't want to dive straight 
into the spec.
  (The first two paragraphs I've already put in the wiki page, as I 
believe they are not contentious).

* A description of the use of interaction patterns, and the definition of 
all the ones that I'm
  aware that we've talked about so far.

* Linking the implementation profiles to the interaction patterns.


Note that I have quite heavily reintroduced the term "Action 
implementations", meaning the ways that a request can be formed to execute 
an Action. The relationship with interaction patterns is: each Action 
implementation "uses" (or "identifies") one or more interaction patterns. 
Usually one, but it has to allow the "many" case for when interaction 
patterns extend each other, e.g. the Automation Request pattern is a 
specialisation/extension of the "HTTP Request" pattern.
However the dual use of the word "implementation" (in both "Action 
implementations" and "implementation profiles") may cause confusion, so we 
may want to rename Action Implementations to be something else, but they 
are not always "requests", e.g. when they use the "Dialog" interaction 
pattern.

You may wan to skip most of the definitions of the interaction patterns 
themselves, as my changes are quite long. Perhaps just look at "HTTP 
Request" as the most basic one, and "Resource shapes" or "Automation 
Requests" as an example one an extension of an interaction pattern, but 
don't get hung up on the details just yet.



Kind regards,

Martin Pain
Software Developer - Green Hat
Rational Test Virtualization Server, Rational Test Control Panel
Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration - Automation WG joint chair

E-mail: martinpain at uk.ibm.com
Find me on:  and within IBM on:  




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