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Subject: Review of Two Diffs (Michael/Sue's and Stephen's)
Here is my assessment of the differences found using the 'diff' technique, and my resolution proposals/suggestions. There are ten in all. 1. Address. Street Name. Name vs Address. Street Name. Text This appears in both sets of diffs. Proposed amendment - change published spreadsheet to Address. Street Name. Name Reason this will match Address. Additional_ Street Name. Name 2. Michael and Sue's spreadsheet picked up on Address. Additional_ Street Name. Name, etc - published spreadsheets have extra spaces after the underscore in the DEN's This is a known issue which has been pointed out many times before and appears to be due to a 'bug' in the formula generating the DENs in the published spreadsheets. In the past the DEN's in Schemas were not taken from the spreadsheet so this was just overlooked. Now the DEN's still are not taken from the spreadsheet so I overlooked it as before. The effort to put this right might be out of proportion to the importance and the impact, if any, of leaving it. I propose to ignore it for now. 3. Michael and Sue's work picked up on the extra dot at the end of ASBIE DEN's e.g. Address. Address Line. in the published spreadsheets but not the Schemas (labelled 'rt' in their work) I ignored it as too minor to warrant discussion since, again, the DEN's are generated and not normative. It might be worth fixing the formula to correct this but experience from 'beta' with the formulas makes me think it might be more trouble than the impact warrants. 4. Both sets of diffs picked out the error in Allowance Charge. Reason. Code This has little significant impact. I suggest amending the spreadsheet because that avoids changing the Schemas but I accept that it could be argued that the Schemas could be changed because the change is to the documentation only. The 'tag' name is unaffected. 5. Michael and Sue's worked picked up on the dropping of 'Currency_' from the DEN of Allowance Charge. Currency. Currency_ Code in the published spreadsheets I don't know which is correct but I think this is particularly worth changing if the error is in the Schemas since they are normative. However, it would be worth changing the spreadsheets if it was clear which version was correct (from the CCTS). If it is unclear and the Schemas don't need to be changed then I'd change the spreadsheets to keep them consistent with the Schemas 6. My diff ommitted the differences in the DEN's for Allowance Charge. Amount since this difference only occurs in the DEN and not in the other column values. Michael and Sue's diff picked up on it. I would propose that since this requires a change to the formula which generates DEN's it is probably not worth fixing, except to add a note to the spreadsheets or package documentation to say that the spreadsheet DEN's should not be treated as normative or relied on. Perhaps the values from the Schemas should be those which are submitted to TBG17 if it is not too late. I do anticipate push-back on this but I'm bearing in mind with this and all such spreadsheet formula errors or inadequacies, that a spreadsheet formual has limited 'granularity' or precision when compared to a scripting or programming language for generating such strings. 7. Both diffs picked up on a high-impact difference. Exchange Rate. Operator. Code The impact of this is high because it has resulted in the loss of the Operator codelist from the CAC Schema. This needs a correction to the CAC Schema. EF has it just as Datatype 'Code. Type' but it should be 'Operator_ Code. Type' which would bind it to the operator codelist. Backwards compatibility might be barely affected if the NDR rule is followed which requires new namespaces anyway. This correction would require that that be done anyway (as we are discussing on ubl-dev with regard to restrictions of 'bound' codelists.) The impact of the new namespaces on backwards compatibilty is obvious but acceptable, I would think, in the move from cd to specification (I take it that is what we are doing at this stage - if not then we have another problem, we need a second 'cd' namespace, probably.) 8. There are two obvious errors in the spreadsheets published, both similar, but both can be corrected in the spreadsheets without affecting anything else: DocumentDocumentStatusCode and IssueIssueDateDate, both in OrderReference. The reason my diff overlooked these was because I had chosen to ignore the DEN column which is one place the error is evident and, more pertinently, I had ignored the DataTypeQualifier column due to the fact that EF treats this completely differently to the published spreadsheets, which therefore masked the difference. (Sue and Michael hadn't filtered out the DEN differences and so highlighted this error.) . [Also, this was already listed elsewhere in our bug-list.] The Datatype Qualifiers in the published spreadsheets should be corrected. 9. Both diffs found the Schema error Payment Means. Payment Means. Code which is incorrectly named Payment Means. Payment_ Means Type. Payment Means_ Code in the Schemas which also have an incorrect 'tag' name PaymentMeansTypeCode. This was changed to remove the name part 'Type' during the drafting phase of 1.0 but to change it now would produce a backwards incompatibility into 1.0. I threfore propose that the spreadsheet be changed to include the extra word 'Type'. A loose end will then be the name of the codelist. This is currently PaymentMeansCode but it cannot (as far as I can imagine) be changed so there will be a discrepancy which should probably be well documented. The documentation will need to be examined for any other mentioning of this element name to ensure it is kept consistent. (ubl-dev pointed out a discrepancy here.) Chee-Kai pointed out that the list of values included the 'Type' word but this will now have stay like that, rather than being corrected as Chee-Kai suggested. Another discrepancy is in the distribution of terms between columns which should be corrected in the Schema documentation (with no impact on instances) 10. Both diffs found the error in the published Order Change document spreadsheet. The Schema is correct. The Amount for LineExtensionTotal should be of Datatype UBL_ Amount. Type rather than Amount. Type. The published spreadsheets should be changed. With regard to my filtering out of spreadsheet DEN formula discrepancies, I think it is most important to find any errors which might impact on instances. This is not to say that DEN's etc are not important to get right, of course, for interoperability. I just think we are well aware of the limitations and almost to say crudeness of the spreadsheet DEN formula and would not really wish it to be relied on when Schemas can rather use a properly and more extensively programmed formula. Then there is consideration of there perhaps being some room for interpretation in the production of the DEN anyway. Stephen Green
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