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Concerto 0.82 to 1.0

Concerto 1.0 delivers fundamental improvements over previous releases, whilst maintaining a high-degree (though not total!) of backwards compatibility with 0.82. In particular all of the 0.82 Concerto syntax remains valid in 1.0.

note

We are currently in the process of migrating the Accord Project stack to Concero v1.0. Until the migration is complete Concero v1 is tagged as an alpha and may undergo minor additional changes and fixes.

Summary of Breaking Changes

  • Systems models are no longer supported
  • DateTime values do not preserve the timezone offset and are always converted to UTC
  • Validation has been made stricter, which means some previously allowed instances will now fail validation
  • The syntax and semantic of relationships has been changed

Removal of System Models

See: #62

An advanced feature of prior versions of Concerto was the ability to add a system model to the ModelManager, which functioned as an implicit set of base types for concepts, assets, participants etc within the scope of the ModelManager. This feature complicated the APIs considerably, and it had the effect of making CTO models non-portable, in as far as they could only be loaded into a ModelManager that used the same set of system models.

System models have therefore been removed from Concerto v1 — any base types should now be imported and referenced explicitly into model files.

Strict Validation

See: #157 #158

Prior to Concerto v1 validation suffered from some side-effects of JavaScript type-coercion. For example, "NaN" would be a valid value for a Double field. These edge cases have now been tightened up, so some instances that were valid prior to v1 may now fail validation.

Identifiers and Relationships

See: #181

Prior to v1 a relationship could only be declared to an asset, participant, transaction or event (as these must be identified by). In v1 two new capabilities have been added:

  1. Concepts can now be declared to be identified by an identifying field, allowing them to be used with relationships
  2. Any type can be declared as identified — to automatically create a system $identifier field.

The model below is valid with Concerto v1.

namespace org.accordproject

concept Address {
o String country
}

concept Product identified by sku {
o String sku
}

concept Order identified {
o Double ammount
o Address address
--> Product product
}

Root of Type Hierarchy

See: #180

All declared types now have concerto.Concept as their super type, and the concerto namespace is reserved. Note that the super type for concerto.Concept is null.

Functional API (experimental)

See: #188

A new streamlined Concerto API has been added, to replace some of the existing runtime APIs. Existing runtime APIs have been preserved, but will be progressively removed.

The Concerto API is much more functional in nature, and allows plain-old-JavaScript objects to be validated using a ModelManager — removing the need to use the Factory API to create JS objects prior to validation, or to use the Serializer to convert them back to plain-old-JavaScript objects. This should reduce the learning-curve for the library and improve performance.

const { ModelManager, Concerto } = require('@accordproject/concerto-core');
const modelManager = new ModelManager();

modelManager.addModelFile( `namespace org.acme.address
concept PostalAddress {
o String streetAddress optional
o String postalCode optional
o String postOfficeBoxNumber optional
o String addressRegion optional
o String addressLocality optional
o String addressCountry optional
}`, 'model.cto');

const postalAddress = {
$class : 'org.acme.address.PostalAddress',
streetAddress : '1 Maine Street'
};

const concerto = new Concerto(modelManager);
concerto.validate(postalAddress);

API Changes

API additions are prefix by a > character, while API removals are prefixed by a <.

note

A new simplified Concerto class has been created to validate JSON data against a Concerto model. The Concerto class wraps a ModelManager and allows JS objects to be validates without using the Factory or Serializer classes.

> class Concerto {
> + void constructor()
> + void validate(undefined) throws Error
> + void getModelManager()
> + boolean isObject()
> + void getTypeDeclaration()
> + string getIdentifier()
> + boolean isIdentifiable()
> + boolean isRelationship()
> + void setIdentifier(string)
> + string getFullyQualifiedIdentifier()
> + string toURI()
> + void fromURI(string) throws Error
> + string getType()
> + string getNamespace()
> + boolean instanceOf(String)
> }
note

AssetDeclaration and other stereotypes now extend IdentifiedDeclaration rather than ClassDeclaration. Methods relating to whether the type can be the target of a relationship have been removed as all types can now be used with relationships, and methods have been added to denote whether a type has an automatic (system) identifying field (primary key), no identifying field, or is using an explicitly defined identifying field.

< class AssetDeclaration extends ClassDeclaration {
> class AssetDeclaration extends IdentifiedDeclaration {
< + boolean isRelationshipTarget()
< + string getSystemType()
< + boolean isRelationshipTarget()
< + boolean isSystemRelationshipTarget()
< + boolean isSystemType()
< + boolean isSystemCoreType()
> + Boolean isIdentified()
> + Boolean isSystemIdentified()
> + Boolean isExplicitlyIdentified()
< class EventDeclaration extends ClassDeclaration {
> class EventDeclaration extends IdentifiedDeclaration {
< + string getSystemType()
> class IdentifiedDeclaration extends ClassDeclaration {
> + void constructor(ModelFile,Object) throws IllegalModelException
> + boolean hasInstance(object)
> }
< class ParticipantDeclaration extends ClassDeclaration {
> class ParticipantDeclaration extends IdentifiedDeclaration {
< + boolean isRelationshipTarget()
< + string getSystemType()
< class TransactionDeclaration extends ClassDeclaration {
> class TransactionDeclaration extends IdentifiedDeclaration {
< + string getSystemType()
note

ModelFile has been updated to remove system model files.

class ModelFile {
< + void constructor(ModelManager,string,string,boolean) throws IllegalModelException
> + void constructor(ModelManager,string,string) throws IllegalModelException
< + ClassDeclaration[] getDeclarations(Function,Boolean)
> + ClassDeclaration[] getDeclarations(Function)
< + boolean isSystemModelFile()
}
note

Concept has been removed, as all types are now identifiable and now extend Resource.

< class Concept extends Typed {
< + boolean isConcept()
< }
note

Resource has extended to capture that some resources are concepts, and are identifiable.

class Resource extends Identifiable {
> + boolean isConcept()
> + boolean isIdentifiable()
}
note

ValidatedConcept has been removed. Users should now call the validate method explicitly to validate data.

< class ValidatedConcept extends Concept {
< + void setPropertyValue(string,string) throws Error
< + void addArrayValue(string,string) throws Error
< + void validate() throws Error
< }
note

ModelLoader constructor has been updated to remove system models.

class ModelLoader {
< + object loadModelManager(string,string[],object,boolean)
< + object loadModelManagerFromModelFiles(string,object[],undefined,object,boolean)
> + object loadModelManager(string[],object,boolean)
> + object loadModelManagerFromModelFiles(object[],undefined,object,boolean)
}
note

ModelManager has been updated to remove system models. These are non-breaking changes that remove the last argument to method calls.

class ModelManager {
< + Object addModelFile(string,string,boolean,boolean) throws IllegalModelException
> + Object addModelFile(string,string,boolean) throws IllegalModelException
< + Object[] addModelFiles(object[],undefined,boolean,boolean)
> + Object[] addModelFiles(object[],undefined,boolean)
< + void writeModelsToFileSystem(String,Object,boolean,boolean)
< + Object[] getModels(Object,boolean,boolean)
> + void writeModelsToFileSystem(String,Object,boolean)
> + Object[] getModels(Object,boolean)
< + ClassDeclaration[] getSystemTypes()
}