BDT Management

History

Score 1.x classified DT into CDT, Default BDT, Unqualified BDT, and Qualified BDT.

Default BDT are the BDT with random alphanumeric suffix. They are essentially variations of the CDT. A couple of default BDTs in 10.x however are extensions of CDT, while the majority of them are considered restrictions of the CDT.

Initially, Score (or SRT at the time) intended to import only default BDTs that are used by higher level OAGIS entities such other BDTs and BCCPs. The name ‘default’ came from initial thought that OAGIS used only one default BDT per data type term. Further, the thought was that the one default BDT is used to create a rather generic unqualified BDT (e.g., AmountType unqualified BDT uses AmountType_0723C8) and BCCPs use only unqualified and qualified BDTs. However, later on it was found that a handful of BCCPs used default BDT directly.

Also it was thought or assumed that qualified BDTs are only based on unqualified BDTs but that was not the case. There were some qualified BDTs directly based on default BDTs - which is not invalid. However, when a qualified BDT is based on the default BDT that is also a based on the unqualified BDT; this is somewhat not making sense.

Also initially, not all BDTs with the alphanumeric suffix in the DEN were planned to be imported as individual records. Only those used by other OAGIS entities were going to be imported and the BDT schema was going to be kept as blob. Later on Hakju imported all BDTs in the BDT schema file as individual database records.

In 1.x, the database has only 2 types in the DT table indicating CDT or BDT.

Come 2.x

As we were working on 2.0, we want to narrow down choices of BDTs when the user creates a BCCP rather than presenting hundreds of them at once. The question arise to how do we classified BDTs for both BCCP creation purpose and also for BDT management itself.

BDT classification

Considerations

Requirements for BCCP

We perhaps want to drive the Score users to use qualified and unqualified BDTs for CC and discourage the use of other BDTs because further refinement can be done on the BIE side. This makes the standard flexible.

So we may want to keep the qualified and unqualified BDTs notions.

Requirements for BDT management

In general, the user may want create a qualified BDT from a default BDT, so we cannot limit the base of the qualified BDT to be only unqualified BDTs. At the same time we don’t want to put default BDTs into the same bucket as unqualified BDTs either.

Some BCCPs may indeed use any CDTs or BDTs directly too. But this is fine b/c on the BCCP creation page we will allow this, it is just that we will set default filters so that qualified and unqualified BDTs are shown.

The above cases can occur when someone want to use Score to create rather a restricted, domain specific standard.

Problems

1. The name “default BDT” is perhaps not good.

2. The notion of default BDT is perhaps should not be used in BDT management for the user to designate a BDT as a default BDT.

Possible solution

1 = CDT

2 = BDT. This will be default value for when the user create a new BDT. All default BDTs will have this classification. This is considered unqualified BDT. It can be based on CDT or BDT but it does not have a qualifier.

3 = qualified BDT. Qualified BDT can be based only on BDT (#2)

Make another column to designate “Commonly used BDTs”. Any BDT or qualified BDTs can be marked commonly used. We will mark BDTs currently classified as unqualified BDTs, Qualified BDTs, and default BDTs currently used as commonly used.