About Conceptual Model Preferences

A conceptual model spans multiple functional areas, and includes configuration related to commercial order management, service order management, and technical order management. Your role determines whether you work on the entire model or in a single functional area. For example, an enterprise architect is concerned with the entire model, and needs to ensure that all products, customer facing services, service actions, components, resource facing services, resources, and other conceptual model entities are fully modeled and include valid references and relationships. Enterprise architects need to see validation errors for all missing conceptual model entities and for unresolved references.

A conceptual model may be developed by a team of developers working in different projects. In this organization, some developers work in projects that include only products and references to customer facing services. Other developers may work in projects that include only customer facing services and service actions. While other developers may work with sets of projects that include the resource facing services and resources for a specific technology.

In this organization, there are multiple projects that comprise the entire solution. Developers working in projects related to the service order management and technical order management layers may not be interested in the projects related to commercial order management. These developers will likely want to include in their workspace only those projects in the model that are relevant to their work.

If you load only a subset of the conceptual model projects into your workspace, Design Studio generates validation errors because the system detects missing entities, references, and relationships. You can reduce the number of errors and relax the validation in the areas outside of the scope of your work by defining conceptual model preferences. The Conceptual Model Preferences page in Design Studio enables you to define a validation severity level for each functional area defined in your conceptual model.

Based on the settings that you define for a functional area on the Conceptual Model Preferences page, Design Studio uses the following rules to evaluate the validation severity levels:

• For each functional area, Design Studio determines the provider functions that are impacted.

• Design Studio generates validation errors for poorly-formed named relationships defined between source and target entities in the impacted provider functions. Validation issues in all other provider functions are identified as warnings.

• Design Studio generates action-related validation errors (such as mandatory and multiple action checks) for actions named as a source or target for impacted provider functions and for actions directly associated to the specified functional area.

• Design Studio generates realization validation errors for source entities named in the impacted provider functions, including actions. Realization validation issues in all other provider functions are identified as warnings. Design Studio generates fulfillment pattern reference-related errors for source entities in the impacted provider functions. Fulfillment pattern reference-related issues in all other provider functions are identified as warnings.