Today, during its weekly conference call, the Methods & Tools Special Interest Group decided to publish four additional Named Values.
Named Values are properties of the Simulation Context that let a Process Modelling Environment advertise its configuration to Process Modelling Components.
Within the development of COBIA, the Methods & Tools SIG is developing a new version of the CAPE-OPEN standard. Curently this version is at 1.2 and is distributed with COBIA 1.2. The report interface (ICapeUnitReport) of CAPE-OPEN 1.1, specific to Unit Operations, is replaced in CAPE-OPEN 1.2 by a more general reporting interface.
To take full advantage of the additional functionalities such as an extended range of formats for reports handed over by PMCs to the PME, the PME may advertise its preferences in terms of images so that reports as images may be in a format that is adequate for further handling by the PME, like resizing.
Three additional Named Values are related to images as reports: ImageWidth, ImageHeight and ImageResolution.
In addition the PME may advertise its preferred character encoding for textual report. For this purpose a fourth additional Named Value, CharacterEncoding, has been defined which carries this information to any PMC.
Named Values are provided for improving the interoperability through CAPE-OPEN. Named Values by themselves are not part of the CAPE-OPEN IDL. CO-LaN recommends any developer of PMCs and PMEs to take them into consideration where applicable.
In future revision of the CAPE-OPEN standard, it is foreseen that such requests on report format will be passed through arguments of methods of ICapeReport interface instead of through Named Values.