ICAR Animal Data Exchange Working Group – Technical meeting 26 August 2021

• In attendance: Andreas S, Andrew C, Anton H, Craig V, Erwin S, Peter B, Thomas P

Agenda:

Start with the remaining things (the 7 open pull requests) we need to close out for the current release we are working on.

1. Add management and performance URL schemes (#237)

Arjan L had been selected as reviewer but he is away. Andrew C will add Erwin S as reviewer so he can approve. This will close off the issues marked for this release.

2. Nullable declaration is not working correctly for reference types (#214)

The issue is that it is not generating C# code correctly. It is risky to change it now, especially with the pending changes between OpenAPI 3.0 and 3.1 code generation.
We agreed to set it as a known issue in version 1.2, advise that version 1.3 is coming soon. We should address the issue for version 1.3. See also #239.

3. Changes for parturition event with new progeny details (#243)

Anton H described the changes in the pull request he has proposed. It is adding new types for progeny details and enumeration parameters for progeny birth statuses. Rather than BirthStatus referring to died before or after a specified number of days, it is proposed in the draft pull request to have the enumerations DiedBeforeOfficialRegistrationDate and DiedAfterOfficialRegistrationDate.

We suggested making progeny details type into a resource. This addresses part of #191. We discussed whether birthWeightScore and musclingScore should be enumerations or scores. We agreed enumerations were better. Field names like BirthSize and Muscling (or MusclingType) would be more suitable for the enumeration fields. Anton H will suggest some values for the enumerations.

4. Feed and AnimalSet (#202)

There was discussion about why this issue was tagged as "documentation". Andrew C responded that he had commented that if Thomas D's response is sufficient, we could make this a Documentation issue.

We agreed that a good place to put human-readable documentation is in the wiki. In the JSON schema for the Feed Report we should say to refer to the wiki page for more information.

5. Alternative Type for Coat Color (#240)

It is helpful to have a master list of colors so that, where there is commonality, countries use the same term. The schema/identifier approach could help us across different species and, if you needed to, for a specific country you could have a specific scheme. For Coat Color we can create a new field and mark the old one as deprecated (not removed until next major release). See also #240. Andreas S to suggest a color scheme for cattle. Suggested opening a draft pull request linked to an issue.

6. Priorities for next releases

There was a question on prioritisation events on what we want in the next releases.

With previous releases we have identified things we want included. Feed was identified as one thing we wanted included in 1.2. We are now saying 1.2 is done. In 1.3 we are going to try to address the nullable issue, make sure our code generation works well. And then what is on the roadmap for 1.4?

7. List of breaking changes

It was suggested we start forming a collection of issues relating to breaking changes with version 2 in mind. We will open these issues and attach a breaking tag.

8. Release of version 1.2

We hope we can release version 1.2 in the next week. From here we will finish dealing with these open not draft pull requests, we will do some code generation to make sure we have not broken anything with them, checked that the documentation is up-to-date and then we will start doing the release process. Erwin S to be made a reviewer so he can test.

Next meeting scheduled for 9 September 2021 at 8:15am CET