6.3.1 Characteristics of Patches

Patches have these characteristics, which must be followed by the software that creates the Patches (the “writer”):

• Each Patch has an explicit zero-based PatchIndex which must be consecutive numbers (no gaps). Patches should appear in index order in XML documents. Note, that in future versions of RESQML, this ordering will be mandatory.
• RESQML defines many types of Patches. Each Patch data object includes the word “patch” in its name, e.g., TrianglePatch.
• Each Patch itself has a range of indexable elements.