Validate Workflow

And finally, the validate workflow, used to check if the information in all OSS and BSS is still the same with the information in the subscription. One way to do this is to reconstruct the payload sent to the external system using information queried from that system, and compare this with the payload that would have been sent by generating a payload based on the current state of the subscription. The @validate_workflow decorator takes care of necessary subscription administration. There is no initial input form for this type of workflow.

@validate_workflow("Validate l2vpn")
def validate_l2vpn() -> StepList:
    return (
        begin
        >> validate_l2vpn_in_ims
        >> validate_l2vpn_terminations_in_ims
        >> validate_vlans_on_ports_in_ims
   )

1. Necessary subscription administration (@validate_workflow):
   1. Register validate process for this subscription
   2. Set subscription ‘out of sync’, even when subscription is already out of sync
2. One or more steps to validate the subscription against all OSS and BSS:
   1. Validate subscription against IMS:
      1. validate_l2vpn_in_ims
      2. validate_l2vpn_terminations_in_ims
      3. validate_vlans_on_ports_in_ims
3. Set subscription ‘in sync’ again (@validate_workflow)

When one of the validation steps fail, the subscription will stay ‘out of sync’, prohibiting other workflows to be started for this subscription. The failed validation step can be retried as many times as needed until it succeeds, which finally will set the subscription ‘in sync’ and allow other workflows to be started again. This safeguards workflows to be started for subscription with mismatching information in OSS and BSS which would make these workflows likely to fail.

It is better to limit the number of validations done in each step. This will make it easier to see in a glance what discrepancy was found and will make a retry of the failed step much faster. A commonly used strategy is to use separate steps for each OSS and BSS, and separate steps per external system for each payload that was sent. This can be done by comparing a payload created for a product block in the orchestrator with a payload that is generated by querying the external system.

Not only validations per subscription can be done, is also possible to validate other requirements. For example, to make sure that there are no L2VPNs administered in IMS that do not have a matching subscription in the orchestrator, a task (a workflow with Target.SYSTEM) can be written that will retrieve a list of all L2VPNs from IMS and compare it against a list of all L2VPN subscription from the orchestrator.