v1-learnings.md

What we learned about the V1 model

We learnt the following while exposing the functionality of the V1 DAVL model over a simple CLI.

Give/Claim workflow is clumbsy

The current workflow for generating new Holiday allocation is clumbsy. The boss has to Gift the employee, who then has to Claim the Gift. This doesn't match the natural intuition of holiday allocation. But we do it because it is necessary for an employee to be a signatory of the allocation.

However, a better model would be for the employee to register with a boss, which then delegates the rights for the boss to create new Holiday allocation on behalf of that employee. This also answers the question of who can be who's boss! We will probably do this in next version.

Getting the correct signatories is important

Currently a boss cannot see the Denial contracts stemming from the Deny choices they exercised. This is a shortcoming. A simple fix would be to add the boss as an observer on the Denial contracts, but this is not enough! The boss should in fact be a signatory on a Denial contract if the contract is to have any worth to the employee (i.e. as a record of unfair denials), because without a signature from the boss, then the denial can be faked - the contract created by the employee alone.

Be careful when referencing an external contract by ContractId

Because, when that other contract has been spent (archived), a fetch on the contractId will fail.

This causes an small issue in the current model because of the way multiple Requests can be created which reference the same Holiday allocation. We like this model; the behaviour is flexible. It allows functionality such as an employee making a holiday request for one of a set of dates, but allowing the boss to make the final choice of the precise date.

However, in the current model, a Request can only be exercised by an Approve or Deny choice. Of course we want the approve to fail, or else we have a situation where the same Holiday allocation is spent twice. But unfortunately, the Deny choice also fails, which is counter intuitive. This occurs because the definition of Deny make a call to fetch allocationId, a call which is entirely unnecessary. However, the model is not completely broken, the employee can simply archive the now useless Request contract.