Hi,

I recently asked a question about service specifications and I now have a question about service operations.

SID allows us to define the specification of a service (specification / characteristic pattern). Does it allow to define service operations (create, modifiy, delete, etc.) and the associated parameters?

Schematically:

Howdy, Angely. When we first started developing the SID we did include some example operations for entities. But once the TM Forum teams, such as the no longer active TIP program and the Open Digital API program, started developing APIs based on the SID they did not want to be constrained by the operations defined by SID modelers. They wanted to define the operations and publish them as part of the APIs. So, all the example operations were removed. The API teams also develop a data model based on the SID. So it would be a challenge to put them back into the SID. For example, if a class hierarchy was collapsed.

Here is a link to the APIs that have been developed - https://www.tmforum.org/strategic-program/apis/. If you have a requirement that is not supported by one of the many APIs, then you and your development team can develop an API, and if you choose to, add operations to your implementation of the SID associated with an API.

Hi John Reilly.

The SID purposely does not include operations on any entity.

Is there a particular reason for that choice? I would say because SID is a structural view and not a behavioral one but that's not entirely true since during the system step, methods (behaviors) are added to entities.

The API teams are responsible for defining the actions to take on entities as part of their work.

Which team are you talking about? A team of the TMF (the Integration Framework team) or an internal team or our enterprise?

If you choose not to use the API actions then you can certainly add operations to your implementation of the SID.

Yes, but the thing is we don't want to misunderstand SID. Maybe the TMF does not originally include operations because it's considered as a bad practice.

However, just like characteristics, we think that allowing the definition of operations signature in SID brings even more flexibility and coherence for the services designer. I mean, where to define signatures if it is not in SID? In some specification documents? We also think that's the way to go to automatically generate HTML forms based on the signatures stored in the SID model.

Thanks again for your answers very valuable for us.