In the 11 April Automation meeting we discussed a scenario around creating templates of resources and a proposal for satisfying it. There were a few issues raised and agreement to recap and continue the discussion on the mailing list.
The scenario document [1] does a good job of describing the requirement, so I will no re-hash them here beyond stating that a consumer needs to create a template or draft of an Automation Request which will be used to create/POST a real Automation Request for execution at a later point in time. The proposed solution presented by Umberto Caselli was a new OSLC dialog type which I will tentatively call templateDialog (might be in oslc namespace, might be in oslc_auto). templateDialog would appear in the service provider document in the same manner as creationDialog and selectionDialog. The behavior would be: - consumer hits the templateDialog URL and brings up a UI which would likely be the same as, or very similar to, an Automation Request creation dialog - consumer fills out the parameters for the template and hits OK or Submit - The provider creates the representation for the Automation Request and uses the OSLC delegated UI protocol to return the resource to the consumer. - The provider can choose to persist the template resource or not - The consumer later uses the resource it received to POST a new Automation Request at a later time for execution. This could also be used for repeated scheduled executions. Some discussion items which were raised - see the meeting minutes [2] for a longer list - Automation Plan could change after template creation and the consumer is using a stale/incorrect template. However this window could exist today, perhaps smaller. - Creation of a new dialog type seems "heavy" in terms of an addition to a domain spec. Should this be part of OSLC core if other domains have this requirement or scenario? - Can OSLC prefill (perhaps with use of other metadata such as HTTP headers) be used to satisfy this scenario? [1] - http://open-services.net/wiki/automation/Automation-Template-Scenarios [2] - http://open-services.net/wiki/automation/AutomationMeetings20130411/ Regards, Mike Michael Fiedler IBM Rational Software [email protected] 919-254-4170
