How do I design a search operation in Z notation whereby the search function requires at least one details?

Question

This is my Z schema for Appointment DB.

|--AppointmentDB----------------
|attendees : P Person /** those involved in the appointment **/
|
|/** a new TYPE object to store attendees, schedule and purpose **/
|appointments : P APPOINTMENT
|hasAppointment : Person <-> APPOINTMENT
|schedule : APPOINTMENT -> DateTime
|purpose : APPOINTMENT -> Report 
|
|/** a forward relation compositions to relate attendees with purpose and schedule **/
|attendeePurpose : hasAppointment;purpose 
|attendeeSchedule : hasAppointment;schedule 
|-----------------------------
|attendees ⊆ dom(hasAppointment)
|attendees ⊆ dom(attendeePurpose)
|appointments ⊆ ran(hasAppointment)
|-----------------------------

I would like to create a search function that finds an appointment based on the name of the attendees.

1. I want the search function to return all the details of the appointment object.

How do I design it?

---

Here is my take :

|--FindAppointment---------------------------------------------------
|ΞAppointmentDB
|attendees? : Person
|appointmentAttendees! : P Person
|appointmentPurpose! : Report
|appointmentSchedule! : DateTime
|-----------------------------
|/** if name of any attendees is given, then it must exist in appointments' domain
|respectively before this function can run**/
|attendees? ∈ dom(attendees)
|
|/** return the set of attendees of the same APPOINTMENT using attendees? as input **/
|appointmentAttendees! = hasAppointment~(|{attendees?}|)
|
|/** Get the image of both forward relational compositions according to set of 
|attendees?**/
|appointmentPurpose! =  attendeePurpose(|{attendees?}|)
|appointmentSchedule! = attendeeSchedule(|{attendees?}|)
|----------------------------------------------------------------------

Answer 1

Have you type checked your specification? Your declaration subject? : P Person states that subject? is a set of persons, but subject? : dom(attendees) implies that subject? is a single person.

• If you want to have either none or one person given you could introduce a datatype analogous to the Maybe monad in functional programming languages (or null values in other programming languages):

  MaybePerson ::= NoPerson | JustPerson <<Person>>
  

  Then you can declare an input like

  subject? : MaybePerson
  

  Then I would to suggest to restrain the possible solutions for one input

  subject? : ran(JustPerson) => schedule! : schedule(|{ JustPerson~ subject? }|)
  

• If subject? is a set of persons you can achieve the same with:

  subject? /= {} => schedule! : schedule(|subject?|)
  

And then just do the same for the other possible input. You can add also a condition that not both entries should be NoPerson resp. not both input sets should be empty.