1 About Design Studio

This chapter provides an overview of Oracle Communications Design Studio, including an introduction to the Design Studio design environment.

Introducing Design Studio

Design Studio is an integrated design environment (IDE). This design-time environment enables you to build and configure Oracle service fulfillment and network and resource management solutions. Design Studio enables you to create and use solutions quickly by providing a consistent design experience for both technical and non-technical users.

About Design Studio Solutions

You use Design Studio to design the run-time behavior of Oracle Communications applications. For example, if you need to provision broadband service orders, you can use Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) to manage the service orders in real-time (you also need a CRM system to capture the order, an inventory system to create the service, an activation system to activate the service in the network, and so forth). Before you can do any real-time order management, however, you first use Design Studio to design the OSM run-time process, to customize the content of the orders, to customize the tasks, to define the data required to fulfill the order, and so forth.

In Design Studio, you package this collection of OSM entities and configuration in an OSM Cartridge project. You create additional Cartridge projects to define other parts of your business processes (for example, Inventory Cartridge projects that customize your design and assign run-time processes, Activation Cartridge projects that contain configuration to activate the service in the network, and so forth). You create other types of projects to augment the data defined in your Cartridge projects, such as Model projects that contain data that you define once and use across multiple applications, and Environment projects that contain information about your run-time servers.

This collection of projects is called a solution.

You package each Cartridge project into an archive file (the archive file is called a cartridge), which you deploy from Design Studio to core applications that are integrated into a run-time environment. When deployed to a run-time environment, cartridges are interpreted by the application server, which then activates the solution. You can undeploy cartridges and deactivate them by removing them from the run-time environment, and you can replace cartridges that exist in the run-time environment to change a solution. Together, the core applications and the deployed cartridges comprise the solution operations environment.

When creating new solutions in Design Studio, you can use productized cartridges (cartridges purchased from Oracle) or reference implementations as starting points to your solution. Also, you can develop your own solutions.

While solutions can include only a single application, typically they leverage multiple, integrated applications. When you design solutions, you can model and configure entities that cross the boundaries of any one specific application. The Design Studio environment integrates the applications used in the solution for a consistent and efficient design experience.

During solution design, you use Design Studio to iteratively design, test, and debug solutions. You can also use Design Studio to maintain solutions and to change them over time. For example, you can quickly change your solution based on ongoing responses from customers, changes in technology, and market analysis. You use Design Studio to configure solutions at all levels of solution maturity, and over the lifetime of a solution. As requirements change, and as your communications services evolve, Design Studio enables you to evolve your solutions. Also, Design Studio simplifies solution evolution by enabling you to update the solution design and to release updates that meet the evolving service requirements.

About Design Studio Roles

Team members may play many roles during solution development. Table 1-1 lists the roles and the tasks each role typically performs in Design Studio.

Table 1-1 Design Studio Roles and Tasks

Role	Tasks
Data Modeler	Designs the data types and structures necessary to support a cartridge or solution.
Cartridge Designer	Designs deployable components spanning a single product domain.
Solution Designer	Assembles collections of cartridges to deliver a solution that includes multiple Oracle Communications applications. Additionally, this role may design additional cartridges to achieve the desired solution functions.
Developer	Builds the code to support the metadata-driven components of a cartridge. This role may be an expert in development languages such as Java, XPath, XQuery, or SQL.
Release Engineer	Manages the solution development and test environment. This role configures and automates the solution build and the solution testing.
Cartridge and Solution Tester	Deploys cartridge archives to a test environment to certify that the cartridge or solution is working as intended.
System Administrator	Manages the design environment software. This role acquires, configures, and distributes Design Studio to cartridge designers.
Design Studio Report Designer	Develops custom reports. This role is a highly-skilled developer familiar with the technologies needed to produce report designs. These technologies include XML, XPath, BIRT, JavaScript, and familiarity with Design Studio cartridge development.

Working with Design Studio for Oracle Communications Applications

In addition to configuring common design-time models that apply across an entire solution, you use Design Studio to configure specific design artifacts for one or more Oracle Communications applications:

• Design Studio for OSM and Design Studio for OSM Orchestration, which you use to define solutions for OSS service order management and for BSS central order management, respectively.

• Design Studio for Inventory, which you use to define service and resource definitions, rules and domain-specific metadata.

• Design Studio for Network Integrity, which you use to configure network discovery, assimilation, and reconciliation behavior.

• Design Studio for ASAP, which you use to define service actions, network actions and scripts for service activation.

About Design Studio for OSM

You use Design Studio for OSM to configure and deploy OSM solutions for order orchestration and for order provisioning. Design Studio for OSM enables you to design process flows to fulfill requests for orders, such as customer, service, and technical orders.

Order provisioning functionality enables you to configure and deploy service provisioning cartridges that include integrations with Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management (UIM), Oracle Communications ASAP, and Oracle Communications IPSA, as well as with third-party applications. Solution integration with UIM and ASAP is facilitated by Design Studio through design-time integration capabilities.

About Design Studio for Inventory

You use Design Studio for Inventory to define the configuration of services and to assign resources to them. Service configuration includes specifications, characteristics, rules, equipment models, capacity models, and component packaging. You define the metadata needed to configure services and map the services to logical and physical resources.

About Design Studio for ASAP

You use Design Studio for ASAP to model services such as voice services (including wireless, voice over IP), data services (including digital subscriber line, IPTV), and other services that require controlled and coordinated activation in the network.

As part of the service fulfilment process, Design Studio for ASAP provides a set of technical actions that you can implement against network and IT resources. You assemble the technical actions into order handling process flows (using OSM), and map the attributes and data from orders (at the service level) to specific resources.

The Design Studio Activation task supports IP Service Activator. For IP Service Activator, OSM data is transformed to a web service order that is sent to IP Service Activator to activate the specified services. You can create workflows that integrate IP Service Activator data and activation actions with other tools and systems.

About Design Studio for Network Integrity

You use Design Studio for Network Integrity to maintain the data integrity of telecommunications data sources. Using Design Studio for Network Integrity, you can connect to devices in the network (such as EMS, NMS, and other systems) to retrieve data; make changes to that discovered data; import inventory data back into the model; create rules to compare data and identify discrepancies; and integrate with external systems to update data and resolve any discrepancies.

About the Design Studio Role in Business Solutions

Design Studio is an integral component in the life cycle of the following business solutions:

• Rapid Offer Design and Order Delivery (RODOD): In this solution, you use Design Studio to configure the fulfillment flow definitions in OSM to support the central order management function. You synchronize sales catalogs in Siebel CRM with OSM by importing sales catalog elements into Design Studio and mapping them to fulfillment flow functions. Additionally, you can configure the metadata and policies required to assist the functions of dynamic decomposition and orchestration plan generation.

• Service and Network Orchestration (SNO): In this solution, you use Design Studio to define an overall solution model representing a high-level abstraction of service fulfillment behavior. This model can then be used to automatically realize a coordinated set of application-specific configurations. This allows a consistent set of configurations and interfaces to be generated for OSM, UIM, and ASAP. For more information about SNO, see the SNO Solution page from Oracle Learning Library:

  www.oracle.com/goto/orchestration

• Network and Resource Management (NRM): In this solution, you use Design Studio to create, manage, and extend cartridges for each domain, or to modify and extend prebuilt definitions in UIM to define specifications, characteristics, and rulesets. Additionally, you can extend or modify the definitions to support the logic and protocol that enables Oracle Communications Network Integrity to discover, assimilate, and reconcile network configuration data in inventory systems.

About Design Studio Product Architecture

Design Studio builds on an extensible Eclipse platform to facilitate the creation of service fulfillment and network and resource management solutions. Eclipse provides a vendor-neutral open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks and tools for building and deploying software. See the Eclipse website for more information about the Eclipse platform.

Working with the Design Studio User Interface

The Design Studio interface includes a number of components to assist you with configuration. Interface components include workspaces, a workbench, perspectives, views, editors, menus, and toolbars.

About Workspaces

The workspace contains a collection of your projects. It appears as a directory on your local machine and it is where Design Studio saves your resources.Your projects exist independent of a workspace, but can only be used in a workspace. The workspace directory root is created on your local machine when you create a Design Studio workspace. The root exists as long as the workspace exists. You can create more than one workspace, but the only one workspace can be open at a time. Using multiple workspaces can help you organize complex projects. For example, you can configure the perspectives in your workspaces to display a specific set of views for specific projects. Or, you can use one workspace to test projects.

When you start Design Studio, you identify a workspace in which you want to work. You can switch to a different workspace, when necessary. Design Studio will automatically close down and restart using the new workspace. See the Design Studio Help for information about switching workspaces.

About the Workbench

The Design Studio workbench is a set of tools you can use to navigate within and manipulate the workspace, access functionality, and edit content and properties of resources.

About Perspectives

Perspectives are collections of views, menus, and toolbars that appear in a specific layout, and they determine how information appears in the workbench. The Design Studio provides two predefined perspectives that work together with Eclipse and third-party perspectives that are used for implementation, debugging, builds, and version control.

Perspectives are task oriented. For example, you use the Design perspective to model the entities in your cartridges. You use the Environment perspective to create and manage the attributes associated with your environment, and to deploy and undeploy cartridges to run-time environments.

Each perspective contains a default set of views and editors, which you can customize. The views automatically included in the Design perspective assist you with cartridge modeling. You can also create your own perspective.

About Views

A view provides access to a specific set of functions, available through the view's toolbars and context menus. For example, the Problem view displays errors that exist in the model entities, so you use the Problem view to locate and resolve entity errors. You use the Dictionary view to model and review data in your workspace. The Dictionary view and Problem view each provide access to a different set of Design Studio functions.

A view can appear by itself, or it can be stacked with other views. You can change the layout of a perspective by opening and closing views and by docking them in different positions in the workbench window.

Figure 1-1 Design Studio Views

Description of "Figure 1-1 Design Studio Views"

About Editors

An editor is a special type of view that enables you to edit data, define parameters, and configure settings. Editors contain menus and toolbars specific to that editor and can remain open across different perspectives.

Design Studio editors are associated with entities. Many Design Studio views enable you to double-click entities to open the entity in the associated editor. For example, you can double-click an entity in the Solution, Studio Projects, Data Elements, and Problems views (among others) to open the associated editor. Additionally, you can double-click table entries that reference entities to open the entity in the associated editor.

For example, if you double-click a Process entity in the Studio Projects view, the Process editor opens. You can create diagrams in the Process editor to illuminate patterns and identify inefficiencies in tasks and processes. Process editor shapes, colors, and presentation can communicate information about the flows and processes.

If you double-click a Specification entity in the Studio Projects view, the Specification editor opens. You can use the Specification editor to define properties of business entities. The Process editor and the Specification editor are just two of the editors available in Design Studio.

Design Studio supports drag-and-drop functionality, enabling you to drag files or entities from the Studio Projects view to editors. Additionally, you can open an editor associated with an entity by dragging the entity from a view into the editor area.An asterisk in the editor title bar indicates that the changes you made in an editor are unsaved.

Navigating Across Solutions Using the Design Perspective

The Design perspective includes a set of linked views that you can use as an entry point to your domain solutions and to view the relationships among the entities and elements in a solution.

Team members of varying skills and at varying points in the solution design can leverage the functionality of the views in the Design perspective. For example:

• Business users and architects who define the underlying concepts of a solution can use these views to navigate across conceptual models without needing to drill down to application-specific details.

• Developers can use these views to begin designing application-specific configurations, using the high-level conceptual model as a starting point.

• Business users can use these views (after a solution is designed and implemented) to reassemble existing capabilities and map them to new product offers for customers. From the Solution view, technical users can import product specifications from a customer catalog and map the product specifications to existing customer facing service specifications.

About the Design Perspective Default Layout

The default layout of the Design perspective enables you to navigate across different views while keeping critical information visible. The default layout includes the Solution, Structure, Data Elements, Notes, and Outline views, among others. These views are linked together, such that when you make a selection in one view or editor, Design Studio updates the content in related views based on the active selection.

For example, the Solution view enables you to organize and view your solutions through products, services, resources, actions, orders and other categories of entities that implement a solution. When you filter this view for a specific category of entity (for example, for all orders defined in the workspace), the view displays all of those types of entities in the workspace and includes child folders that represent all relationships to the entities. When you make a selection in the Solution view, Design Studio updates the content in the Structure, Notes, and Data Elements views to reflect the relationships and content of the selected entity.

Figure 1-1 illustrates how making a selection in the Solution view updates the content in the views linked to the Solution view (in this example, the Structure view).

About Context Menu Options

You can right-click in Design Studio views to open the context menu, which enables you to perform operations in views and to implement data model changes across a solution. You can right-click in the Solution view to add new entities, delete existing entities, or refactor a selected entity. You can maintain focus on a specific entity in the Solution view and perform many of the same operations in the linked views.

For example, you can highlight an Order entity in the Solution view and rename, change the location of, copy, or move the data elements included in the Order entity in the Data Element view. See the Design Studio Help for more information about the Design Studio context menu and about refactoring entities and data elements.

Example: Navigating Across a Solution Design

The following procedure is an example how you can navigate across a solution using the Solution view and the related, linked views.

1. From the Studio menu select Show Design Perspective.

2. Click the Solution tab.

   The Solution view appears.

3. In the Category field, select a type of entity for which to filter the view.

   For example, Select Orders if you want to view all orders in the workspace and navigate among the entities related to orders, such as tasks, processes, permissions, and so forth.

   When you select a category, the Solution view displays all entities of associated with the category type.

4. In the Solution view tool bar, ensure that the Show/Hide Folders button is enabled.

5. Select an entity, and expand the root folder.

   The view displays relationships among entities by displaying child folders that represent relationships to the entity. For some relationships, these folders will appear even if the relationships are not yet established (the folder will be empty).

6. Navigate through the hierarchy by expanding the nested folders until you reach the content you need.

7. Add new entities, delete existing entities, or refactor entities in the Solution view.

   By right-clicking and opening the context menu, Design Studio enables you to perform operations in views and to propagate data model changes across a solution without sacrificing model integrity. See the Design Studio Help for more information about the context menu and about refactoring entities and data elements.

8. Click the Notes tab.

   Use the Notes view to provide documentation for the entity or data element selected in the Solution view. You can annotate entities and data elements when you want to communicate to other team members information about the solution.

9. Click the Structure tab.

   Use the Structure view to view relationships for a selected entity or data element and perform operations on the relationship contents. The Structure view enables you to navigate through and to perform operations on relationship folder contents while maintaining focus on the active entity in the Solution view.

10. Click the Data Elements tab.

    Use the Data Element view to view the simple and structured data elements for the entity selected in the Solution view and to perform operations on those data elements.

    The Data Element view enables you to navigate through and to perform operations on relationship folder contents while maintaining focus on the active entity.

11. In the Solution view, double-click the selected entity to open it in an editor.

    You can edit the data associated with the entity, define parameters, and configure settings for the entity in the entity editor.

12. Click the Outline tab.

    Use the Outline view to view the relationships and to perform operations applicable to the entity associated with the active editor (this view is linked to the active editor).

    For example, you can view data elements associated with the entity and perform applicable refactoring operations in the Outline view while keeping the entity open in the editor.

See "Navigating Across Solutions Using the Design Perspective" for more information.

About Design Studio Reporting

Design Studio enables you to generate reports that include information about an implemented solution. For example, a report can summarize the structure of the solution by listing projects and dependencies, or a report can summarize the composition of a service. Reports can capture the names, types, descriptions, and relationships of projects, entities, and data elements.

Design Studio reports can be used by team members who have not installed Design Studio or who require Design Studio configuration data in document form. Design Studio reporting facilitates information sharing, solution development, and model review tasks.

Design Studio includes reference reports that provide a foundational set of capabilities. You can use these reports as is or as a starting point for customizing your own reports. For example, you can customize the report designs for content, layout, or branding.

You can also develop your own report designs using the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) feature. See Design Studio Developer's Guide for more information about customizing reports.

System administrators can integrate report generation into an automated build system to automatically generate reports that you can reference when developing solutions. See Design Studio System Administrator's Guide for more information.