Modeling

This chapter describe the frePPLe data entities, their fields and relationships.

A couple of initial remarks:

FrePPLe limits itself to the data fields that are relevant for planning.
An ERP or similar system is more transaction-oriented and will contain plenty of more detailed information.
The frePPLe data model is designed to be pretty "atomic" in order to be as generic as possible. Quite often an entity in a source system will map into a collection or sequence of frePPLe entities.
For instance, frePPLe doesn't have a model to represent a bill-of-material. Instead the material relations from the BOM are represented as flows on the manufacturing operations.
The native data format is XML.
FrePPLe doesn't support namespaces in the XML-data:
- The XML-data should not be placed in any namespace.
- FrePPLe XML schema to validate the input data. See the files frepple.xsd and frepple_core.xsd for the definition of the supported constructs.
- To support subclassing the namespace xsi must be defined as "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance".
Considering the above, frePPLe XML files typically start with the following lines:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
      <plan xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
      ...
      </plan>

FrePPLe has a very rich Python API.
Detailed programming and scripting of the frePPLe application is possible in this way. For complex integration tasks and for customization of the algorithms using Python is the recommended way of working.
FrePPLe translates input data to the native encoding on your system (as set by the LC_ALL environment variable on Linux, or the code page on Windows).
The string manipulations inside frePPLe are compatible with the UTF-8 Unicode encoding, but NOT with the UTF-16 or UTF-32 encoding.

Before diving into the details, have a look at the domain model diagram. It shows clear and simple the main entities and their relationships.