On December 4, 2017, the Methods & Tools Special Interest Group has issued a Request For Comments to the CO-LaN membership on a proposal for a general reporting interface to be part of COBIA. Comments are expected before December 31, 2017.
There has been a longstanding desire to expand the capabilities of CAPE-OPEN’s reporting interface, ICapeUnitReport, which is included in the Unit Operation interface specification. Because ICapeUnitReport is defined in the Unit Operation interface specification, and it includes “Unit” in its name, use of ICapeUnitReport is artificially limited to Unit Operation Process Modelling Components (PMCs). As a result, this capability has not been implemented by other types of PMCs or supported for other PMCs by Process Modelling Environments (PMEs). In addition, the current interface is limited in the types of reports that can be generated to just plain text reports.
A work-around for the report format limitation was included in the Unit Errata & Clarifications document through the Simulation Context.
The proposal is for the development of a more generic reporting interface as part of the COBIA project.
The proposed interface is named ICapeReport and fulfills the following use cases:
- Provide a list of available reports and report formats.
- Generate the desired report in the desired output format.