offer-acceptance choreography (was RE: Correlation Requirements)

Fred Cummins wrote:
> when a PO is received, the recipient may respond 
> with an acceptance, a rejection or a revision/amendment.

I know this formulation was not Fred's main point,
so changed the subject, which is locally about
PO responses, but more generally about 
offer-acceptance choreography, which is probably 
the most common business pattern.

Usually revision/amendment is a very different kind
of response from acceptance or rejection. 

Acceptance or rejection mean the offer choreography
is finished.  Revision/amendment usually does not.

It's a counter-offer, which means it rejects the 
initial offer and makes a new offer.

The new offer starts another offer-acceptance round.
For example, does the initiator automatically agree
to any revision/amendment?  Probably not.  

In ebXML we handled this situation also with 
three possible responses to an offer, 
but the third response was different:
accept, reject or counterAdvice.

CounterAdvice was not a counter-offer,
it was a notification that a counter was coming 
and would start a new offer-acceptance round.

That's not the only way to do it, but if you
say the offer-acceptance choreograpy ends
with the revision/amendment response,
the initiator has no way to respond again.

Received on Sunday, 24 August 2003 08:38:32 UTC