I would like to add the PTC Windchill PDMLINK OSLC server as a friend to the IBM Jazz DOORS NEXT server. I believe this first and foremost needs to happen before we can access PTC Windchill OSLC resources to be accessible to IBM DOORS Next.
To add a friend, as per IBM Jazz server documentation, “The URI for root services on the server you want to add as a friend. Format: https://<:port-number>//rootservices”.
Whereas from Windchill PDMLink OSLC server documentation here (PTC Windchill Help Center) it only offers uri in the following format,
“The OSLC Catalog can be accessed at http(s)://:/Windchill/oslc/catalog for more information on all available services, resources and terminology.”.
I tried adding the Windchill OSLC catalog to the IBM Jazz server but it doesn’t like this uri format and expects rootservices uri.
What a mess! OSLC should be a standard and should clearly define how a handshake should work between any OSLC servers and OSLC client. It seems in reality vendor implementations of OSLC are different and can’t even connect. This is disappointing specially OSLC standard should be making integration easier!!
Does anyone come across this issue or with other vendors’ OSLC server and client OOTB integrations?
What’s the solution here? How can the OSLC standard body ensure basic OSLC integration works?
Hoping for constructive work by this community to make OSLC a success else we will lose momentum.
“OSLC Catalog” and “root Services” are 2 different things. IBM Jazz indeed expects a root services document. But the PTC document seems to talk about the Catalog.
On first browse, can’t seem to find a reference in the PTC documentation about a rootservics document, but maybe you can ask PTC’s support? (Unless someone in this community has direct experience with PTC.)
If you want some hands-on experience with how Catalog and Rootservices may look like, please have a look at the OSLC reference implementation. You can run 1 of the 4 servers, and see waht they return.
In the end, an OSLC integration is going to depend on the quality (and completeness) of vendor documentation. From experience, they do indeed vary.
A quick search of “windchill rootservices” gave me this link PTC Help Center
Seems that Windchill knows how to connect to Polarion. So there ought to be the opposite document from Windchill?
And maybe you can try variants of the Catalog URL, to see if you can find the rootservices document.
http(s)://:/Windchill/oslc/rootservices
http(s)://:/Windchill/rootservices
On top of great details shared by Jad, I can add a few things.
OSLC Core Version 3.0. Part 2: Discovery defined a “hands-free” discovery mechanism. To our knowledge, it has not been adopted by any vendor. If you care about this, please reach out to the vendors you are buying your OSLC-compatible software from.
Sadly, this is true. The OSLC standard is very flexible and allows implementations to be developed that are not practically interoperable.
OSLC Profiles is the most constructive place for you to contribute. Right now the calls are missing good participation from consumer orgs that rely on OSLC. You are welcome to join the calls every Thursday.