PDME — Convention for Creating Items

The PDM Enablers defines factory interfaces to create objects but the inputs and results of the create operations are weakly specified.

Each create operation takes a property set as a parameter, but the list of properties required is not fully specified. Note that site-specific business rules may dictate the names and values of required properties. To enable interoperability, though, it would be helpful for the specification to dictate that no unspecified properties be required, and that unspecified properties should default to reasonable values depending on the site’s business requirements. It would also be helpful to specify the name of a property to determine the sub-type of the item to be created, where applicable.

The allowed side effects of each create operation should be specified in as complete a manner as possible. For example, is it legal for the PartMaster create operation to implicitly create persistent objects that support other interfaces such as the PartRevision or PartDataIteration?