Identifiers – how to identify a certain step within a ReqIF roundtrip

[Sebastian]

Hello again,

this is what I learned now regarding how to deal with identifiers and versioning of requirements from my last post:
The IDENTIFIER of a SPEC-OBJECT should never change during the roundtrip.
See ReqIF specification “10.2 Identification of Elements”.
It seems that this applies to the IDENTIFIER of the REQIF-HEADER as well as any other “Identifiable” objects – right? i.e. whenever you have an IDENTIFIER in the xml document, this must stay the same over the whole roundtrip.
The same for the AlternativeId, also.
==> Question: are my assumptions above correct?

Then we have the user-defined attribute “ReqIF.ForeignID”, where the Ecommendation_ReqIF_V2_RZ3.pdf states: Unique human readable identifier on partner-side.
==> Questions
1. who is the partner in this case? Customer or Supplier?
2. is this allowed to change during the roundtrip? I assume yes, as it is only information. But I won’t use it as a “real” identifier anyway, because our internal identifiers are not human readable.

Last but not least, the Implementation Guide from VDA (PSI_ImplementationGuide_ReqIF_V1-7) introduces in section 2.8 another identifier, which might be used to have a conversation id, which stays the same over the whole roundtrip. But if the IDENTIFIER of the REQIF-HEADER should never change during the roundtrip, why would I need this? I can use the identifier of the header element, though.

But most important: I need at least ONE identifier, which IS allowed to change for each export, in order to track which REAL versions of my requirements are in which document. I don’t want to use the creation date or something similar, as it can be easily manipulated.

==> Question: how do I identify a certain state / version of the ReqIF document?
I need to map the SPEC-OBJECTS (which’s identifiers are not allowed to change) to the real requirements in my system. And those requirements change, i.e. will have altered content and thus a new version in my system.

If I cannot transport this new versions of requirements, I need at least an ID which identifies the current state of my ReqIF document.

Any help is appreciated, as we currently stuck at this point.

[Sebastian]

Aha, now I have found this information right here on this page:

ReqIF Under the Hood

which explains: “This ID must be different for every file! In other words, even if just one requirement has changed, a new ID must be used.”

Reading the spec once again, I see that REQIF-HEADER is not an “Identifiable” with respect to section 10.2

This means to me, I can use the IDENTIFIER of the REQIF-HEADER to distinguish between my subsequent exports. I also found out, that ReqIF-Studio does not alter it during export, so this seems appropriate for my purpose.

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