Revisiting where to have Response to TenderingCriterion

In UBL-2.2 the decision was made of not having the Response inside the TenderingCriterionProperty.

The rationale for this was to have QualificationApplicationResponse documents containing only responses and not the whole set of criteria and thus reducing the "verbosity" of the document.

Implementors of the ESPD have complained effusively against this decision as it complicates very much the development of software solutions, namely when identifying the response in criteria with multiple groups with the same type of data structures containing exactly the same QUESTIONs, and also at validation time.

The ones that already implemented version 1.0.2 of the ESPD (where the Response was inside the Criterion) miss very much that other apprach.

Could we revisit this topic? One possible trade-of could be:

• As everything inside the groups and subgroups is optional, all elements unnecessary in the response (name and description of the criterion, groups, subgroups and response, including the REQUIREMENTs) could be avoided in the QualificationApplicationResponse, as they can be retrieved from the QualificationApplicationRequest. This would reduce considerably the "verbosity" of the response document.
• The modification introduced would be the addition of the ASBIE Response to the ABIE TenderingCriterion, which would not break the back-wards compatibility. 
• We would need a new Assembly where the responses would not be necessary any more (currently at the root level), as they would already be contained in the criterion. 

 

 Discussed partially in 

1. UBL-184
2. UBL-185
3. UBL-186