Talking to a colleague (Sam Padgett from the CM workgroup) about the automation workgroup's thoughts on using instance shapes as a possible means of informing consumers what "types" are expected for parameters in an automation plan led to a suggestion to use oslc:Property [1] as the parameter definition. Please take a look at the proposal on the wiki [2] for tomorrow's workgroup meeting. The general approach would be to do away with the current Parameter Definition resource and replace it with an attribute of type oslc:Property (or an extension to oslc:Property).
An alternate approach along this same line would be to have the Automation Plan reference a full-blown Automation Request creation shape, including oslc:Properties for the parameters. The positive to this approach would be that the consumer only needs to request that shape to discover everything it needs to know about creating requests for a specific plan. The drawbacks would be additional service provider complexity and the potential need to make shape support a MUST. [1] - http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/OSLCCoreSpecAppendixA#Value_type_Property [2] - http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/AutoParmDefProposal Regards, Mike Michael Fiedler IBM Rational Software [email protected] 919-254-4170
