BR-BT-00500-0309 rule - invalid string restriction on production - immediate fix needed

[mgakt]

Dear OP,

Dear OP,

We are using SDK 1.13 and have already found a serious issue. We understand that we can't have the "test" string in the BT-500-Organization-Company field. More precisely, we can't have (T|t)(E|e)(S|s)(T|t) any form of "test" string. This rule has to be switched off immediately, as economic operators and contracting authorities have this string on their legal names.

The exact error message was the following:

<svrl:failed-assert id="BR-BT-00500-0309"
location="/can:ContractAwardNotice/ext:UBLExtensions/ext:UBLExtension/ext:ExtensionContent/efext:EformsExtension/efac:Organizations/efac:Organization[4]/efac:Company/cac:PartyName/cbc:Name" test="not(fn:matches(normalize-space(.[./@languageID != '']/normalize-space(text())), '.*(T|t)(E|e)(S|s)(T|t).*'))" role="WARN" flag="LAWFULNESS">
<svrl:text>'Hivatalos név' (BT-500-Organization-Company) nem tartalmazhatja a 'test' szót</svrl:text>

[ferrakaop]

This is a deliberate change in the lawfulness rules to pick up test notices that buyers or eSenders try to publish on TED. Please note that lawfulness checks are warnings and the notices are not rejected.

Notices with warnings are then checked manually by the OP team to determine if the notice is valid or not. There will be some false positives for a very small number of organisations that have the string "test" in their official name but they will not be rejected by OP. We currently validate lawfulness warnings within one working day so there is little or no delay in publishing.

[AlesMMR]

In CZ we are facing same problem. Can you please tell mi what was the purpose/reason to create such rule? Personally I can not identify even one raeson😉 Btw, names of companies should not be matter of validation controls at all in my opinion.

[anusisask]

In Estonia we have the same problem. Currently, there are 84 registered economic operators in our database whose names include this sequence TEST.

[ferrakaop]

Many of you are discovering this new warning in SDK 1.13. Here's a longer explanation about the background.

The rule is quite basic: it looks for the string “test” in the name of every organisation in a notice (the expression can be seen in https://docs.ted.europa.eu/eforms/latest/reference/business-rules/index.html#_lawfulness)

Looking at the past year of notices on TED, there would be less than 1 case per day that would get picked up by this rule:
https://ted.europa.eu/en/search/result?query=%28buyer-name%7Etest+or+organisation-name-tenderer%7Etest%29+and+publication-date%3E20240601&scope=ALL&onlyLatestVersions=false

You may have many companies in your databases with "test" in their name but they are rare on TED. I found 6 Czech cases and no Estonian cases.

We added this rule because some buyers and eSenders were sending test notices in production and we noticed that they overwhelmingly put “test” as their buyer or tenderer – so we want to check these notices manually before they are published, even if the vast majority will be false positives.

But the most important thing is that this rule is a warning not an error. So any notices that trigger this rule can still be submitted as valid but they will need to wait for our team at OP to validate them before publication. In practice, we check the “warning” notices the same working day so there isn’t any noticeable delay in the publishing process.

If your application is telling the end user that these warnings are blocking the submission of the notice, then it’s a bug in the system. These “lawfulness” warnings have always existed in the SDK rules but perhaps the developers/system are only noticing them now – so now they have to handle the warnings correctly.

It’s good if the systems are already set up to handle warnings because we want to progressively add warnings using supervised algorithms – so our rules to detect test notices would be less basic. But I don’t expect anything to be implemented before next year so nothing to worry about yet.

[anusisask]

Thank you for the explanation!

[bertrand-lorentz]

As this not a problem in the SDK, I'm converting this to a discussion.