Discussion: Potential Data Model Improvements

[David E. Jones-2]

On Apr 2, 2011, at 5:41 AM, Paul Foxworthy wrote:

> Status History
> ---------------------
>
> I can see the sense in having one repository for all change tracking. We
> just need to bear in mind there are more use cases for using the information
> in the repository than “auditing”. Auditing is a security activity, and it
> will be security professionals looking at a history of who did what. Looking
> at a status history could well be a business activity with no security
> dimension to it. So viewing the history of changes to an order’s status
> might be something a manager would do.
>
> We would need to structure permissions so that people who need some of the
> information for business purposes can use it even though they are not
> security professionals. The other thing to observe is that status history is
> currently *on* by default in Ofbiz, and auditing is *off* by default.

The "audit log" is a pretty general term and does not imply restricted access to the information. Control of access to any database information is up to the application developer, and nothing about the term "audit log" prevents that.

> QuantityBreak
> ---------------------
>
> No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be used as part
> of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that apply
> to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer various
> agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks consistently.
> It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having to
> define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity breaks
> are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.

Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly simplifies both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct, that quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't happened in any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for the user they are cumbersome).

If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even with the data model designed this way.

> Purchase and Sales Agreements
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> - the AgreementItem has the currency for prices. The currency should be on
> individual AgreementProductAppls. It should be possible to have agreed
> prices in various currencies for a product

> - AgreementProductAppl should have its own from and thru dates. A particular
> price might have a different timespan than the Agreement or (in the case of
> a purchase agreement) the SupplierProduct. You could imagine an agreement
> spanning a year with a list of special prices, each of which is available
> for one month

This is a good point, it would be good to have prices in multiple currencies in the same agreement, I'm modifying the AgreementItemProduct entity in the Mantle data model to support that and in general be more like the ProductPrice entity.

On second thought, after looking at the model, I like them (currency, from/thru dates) on the AgreementItem better since it can apply to multiple things and agreements may be better organized if price lists for different currencies and date ranges are under different items (and the actual data is a lot cleaner).

> - There’s no way at present to have a quantity break associated with an
> agreed price for a sales agreement. Quantity breaks are currently within the
> SupplierProduct entity, so are available for purchase agreements, but not
> sales agreements.

Actually, that's not quite true. The current AgreementProductAppl model is cumbersome, but this last point IS supported (ie agreement-based sales pricing with quantity breaks) in both the OFBiz data model and the sales order code.

In the data model I'm working on this is simplified and much more clear. See the "AgreementItemProduct" entity here:

https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/PartyEntities.xml


> SupplierProduct
> -----------------------
>
> - As David says, a five-attribute primary key is unwieldy. It should be
> replaced with a simple ID.

Agreed. Here is my current take on the SupplierProduct entity:

https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/ProductInventoryEntities.xml

> - SupplierProduct has a minimumQuantity attribute, so must be read in
> combination with other SupplierProducts. SupplierProduct should *not* have
> any information on quantity breaks. There should be just one instance of
> SupplierProduct to record that a product can be obtained from a supplier. A
> SupplierProduct should have associated QuantityBreaks and ProductPrices, as
> described in the Data Model Resource Book.
> - lastPrice in SupplierProduct is used both for the last price we obtained
> the product, and an agreed price. These are two separate things. Given the
> lastPrice might have been determined by an agreement that has expired, and
> by a quantity that we are not ordering this time, it's not very useful. It
> ought to be possible to determine the most recent prices we paid at various
> quantity breaks for a given product from a given supplier

Actually in OFBiz the "lastPrice" is meant to be just that, the last known price from the supplier. It isn't meant to represent any sort of purchase agreement. The Agreement* entities should be used for that (though I don't know off the top of my head if that is current supported in the OFBiz purchase order code).

> TaxAuthorityRateProduct
> -------------------------------------
>
> - This entity is used to determine tax on shipping and promotional pricing
> adjustments, when these are not products. There should be a separate entity
> for tax on all order adjustments, which will determine tax based on the
> adjustment type rather than on the product category

Yes, agreed. In the Mantle UDM I changed the name to "TaxAuthorityRateSales":

https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/AccountingOtherEntities.xml

> - The ProductStore is used to determine the tax payable. That’s fine for
> sales, but makes no sense for purchases. Really, the ProductStore is a proxy
> for the geo of the seller. TaxAuthorityRateProduct should be revised to list
> the geo of the seller rather than the ProductStore, then the same rules
> could be used by purchases as well as sales. For a sale, the ProductStore
> geo would be used as the geo of the seller.

I'm not sure what you mean about the geo of the seller thingy. The geo used on TaxAuthorityRateProduct is the taxAuthorityGeoId where the customer is shipping to (or billing to) a geo where there is a PartyTaxAuthInfo (or Mantle TaxAuthorityParty) record where the seller organization has isNexus=Y.

As for the productStoreId field, it should only be used as an extra constraint on the "rule" record, and should be fine if null (from the model perspective, the code may not currently behave that way).

=======================

Anyway, thanks for your feedback Paul. I've made a few changes while reviewing your comments and related entities and they are now in Mantle UDM.

-David

> David E Jones-4 wrote:
>>
>> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>>
>> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>>
>> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over
>> the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or
>> that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them
>> below...
>>
>> -David
>>
>> ========================================================
>>
>> - Rename *Role entities to *Party
>> - Remove *Attribute and *TypeAttr entities (not generally a good practice
>> to use)
>> - Remove all status history (*Status) and just using audit on the statusId
>> field
>> - ProductPrice add quantity breaks, change PK to single field sequenced
>> - Get rid of QuantityBreak and use the two simple fields instead in each
>> place used
>> - Get rid of ProdCatalog*, rework it to ProductStoreCategory, ie directly
>> associate to the store
>> - Change OrderItemShipGrpInvRes to InventoryReservation, change PK to
>> single field sequenced
>> - Change Quote to be other types of Order
>> - Make Return more like Invoice (ie no adjustment, just use items for
>> everything)
>> - Instead of OrderItemType, OrderAdjustmentType, InvoiceItemType,
>> ReturnItemType just use Shared ItemType everywhere
>> - PartyRelationship simplify (single sequenced ID)
>>
>> - Make prefixes consistent (no suffixes), ie toPartyId instead of
>> partyIdTo, etc
>> - Change all relationships to PartyRole to be type one-nofk; use plain one
>> for Party and RoleType
>> - Move most *Type entities to Enumeration values (update seed data,
>> referring
>>  entities, remove *Type) (after this remove all remaining hasTable
>> fields)
>> - Rework PhysicalInventory and InventoryVariance to simplify, reduce
>> dependency on InventoryItem
>> - Review use of Appl, Assoc (look at book, make sure consistent)
>> - Add PartyIdentification entity, get rid of various fields and other
>> entities (maybe even PartyTaxAuthority...)
>> - Change GoodIdentification to ProductIdentification
>> - Combine PartyContactMechPurpose and PartyContactMech (remove, only use
>> entity with purpose, name PartyContactMech)
>> - Get rid of NoteData, put noteText very-long field directly on various
>> *Note entities
>> - Review all entities with large PKs (esp 4+ fields)
>> - Review and do something with all createOn/By lastUpdateOn/By fields,
>> maybe add an auditing flag for the entity instead of just for a field
>> - CustRequest to Request
>> - FinAccount to FinancialAccount
>> - Invoice handle recurrence? (was using RecurrenceInfo)
>> - Get rid of optional ProductFeature concept (conf/etc products much
>> better model)
>> - Instead of various *Term entities and mapping, just use OrderTerm
>> everywhere
>> - Cleanup/reorg ShipmentCostEstimate, CarrierShipmentMethod, etc, etc
>> - Agreement - make price list easier/cleaner
>> - Remove all createdDate, createdByUserLogin, lastModifiedDate,
>> lastModifiedByUserLogin fields (use framework defaults, audit-log)
>> - Product clean up: move dimenstions to new entity, remove content fields,
>> etc
>> - Trim down big entities like Product, WorkEffort, etc; for groups of
>> similar fields use a more normalized structure
>>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Discussion-Potential-Data-Model-Improvements-tp3390620p3422000.html
> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

[Paul Foxworthy]

Hi David,

Many thanks for your comments.

My responses inline....

Cheers

Paul Foxworthy

On Apr 2, 2011, at 5:41 AM, Paul Foxworthy wrote:

>
> > Status History
> > ---------------------
> >
> > I can see the sense in having one repository for all change tracking. We
> > just need to bear in mind there are more use cases for using the
> information
> > in the repository than “auditing”. Auditing is a security activity, and
> it
> > will be security professionals looking at a history of who did what.
> Looking
> > at a status history could well be a business activity with no security
> > dimension to it. So viewing the history of changes to an order’s status
> > might be something a manager would do.
> >
> > We would need to structure permissions so that people who need some of
> the
> > information for business purposes can use it even though they are not
> > security professionals. The other thing to observe is that status history
> is
> > currently *on* by default in Ofbiz, and auditing is *off* by default.
>
> The "audit log" is a pretty general term and does not imply restricted
> access to the information. Control of access to any database information is
> up to the application developer, and nothing about the term "audit log"
> prevents that.
>

Cool. Do you think it would be a good idea to have limited auditing enabled
from the beginning in a demo/starter system, the rough equivalent of the
current status history?

> > QuantityBreak
> > ---------------------
> >
> > No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be used as
> part
> > of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that
> apply
> > to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer various
> > agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks
> consistently.
> > It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having to
> > define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity
> breaks
> > are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.
>
> Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak
> entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly simplifies
> both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct, that
> quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't happened in
> any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that
> actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for the user
> they are cumbersome).
>
> If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can
> certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even with the
> data model designed this way.
>

QuantityBreak is also used for shipping, and quantity breaks for shipping
are often in terms of weight. I think that's sensible, and the entity should
not be removed altogether.

For product pricing as opposed to shipping, how about keeping QuantityBreak,
but only to support UIs? Remove the relationship between QuantityBreak and
product pricing. What does everyone think?

> Purchase and Sales Agreements
> > -----------------------------------------------
> >
> > - the AgreementItem has the currency for prices. The currency should be
> on
> > individual AgreementProductAppls. It should be possible to have agreed
> > prices in various currencies for a product
>
> > - AgreementProductAppl should have its own from and thru dates. A
> particular
> > price might have a different timespan than the Agreement or (in the case
> of
> > a purchase agreement) the SupplierProduct. You could imagine an agreement
> > spanning a year with a list of special prices, each of which is available
> > for one month
>
> This is a good point, it would be good to have prices in multiple
> currencies in the same agreement, I'm modifying the AgreementItemProduct
> entity in the Mantle data model to support that and in general be more like
> the ProductPrice entity.
>
> On second thought, after looking at the model, I like them (currency,
> from/thru dates) on the AgreementItem better since it can apply to multiple
> things and agreements may be better organized if price lists for different
> currencies and date ranges are under different items (and the actual data is
> a lot cleaner).
>

I think, as a general proposition, a price should have a currency. It's
meaningless without. AgreementItem is an organising principle for components
of an overall agreement, and it should be up to the user to define agreement
items in whatever way makes sense to them. If a company using Ofbiz prices
their products in many different currencies, what you've suggested fragments
product prices into many different agreement items. The currency that a
product happens to be priced in is not necessarily the most important
organising principle for agreed prices.

Similarly, from and thru dates might be useful on individual
AgreementProductAppls. Think about the situation where we have an agreement
for a year with a special-of the-month, a special agreed price for a
different product each month. Does that on its own justify twelve
AgreementItems?

I have no problem with an AgreementItem having *default* from date, thru
date and currency. When we enter an AgreementProductAppl for the
AgreementItem, the defaults obtained from the AgreementItem should be
visible, but they should be editable.

> > - There’s no way at present to have a quantity break associated with an
> > agreed price for a sales agreement. Quantity breaks are currently within
> the
> > SupplierProduct entity, so are available for purchase agreements, but not
> > sales agreements.
>
> Actually, that's not quite true. The current AgreementProductAppl model is
> cumbersome, but this last point IS supported (ie agreement-based sales
> pricing with quantity breaks) in both the OFBiz data model and the sales
> order code.
>

From what I've found:

- At
https://fisheye6.atlassian.com/browse/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/src/org/ofbiz/product/price/PriceServices.java?hb=true#to247,
I think the product pricing code just looks for the first
AgreementProductAppl with no regard for quantities.

- As far as I can tell the QuantityBreak entity is only currently used for
shipping calculations, not pricing.

- The ProductPriceRule entity can hold a number of ProductPriceCond
conditions, including a test for the party and for the quantity, but
ProductPriceRules aren't related to Agreements, and they are only used for
sales, not purchases.

I assume you're talking about the QuantityBreak entity being used for
agreement-based sales pricing. Can you point me to where in the code that
happens?

In the data model I'm working on this is simplified and much more clear. See

> the "AgreementItemProduct" entity here:
>
>
> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/PartyEntities.xml
>
>
> > SupplierProduct
> > -----------------------
> >
> > - As David says, a five-attribute primary key is unwieldy. It should be
> > replaced with a simple ID.
>
> Agreed. Here is my current take on the SupplierProduct entity:
>
>
> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/ProductInventoryEntities.xml
>
> > - SupplierProduct has a minimumQuantity attribute, so must be read in
> > combination with other SupplierProducts. SupplierProduct should *not*
> have
> > any information on quantity breaks. There should be just one instance of
> > SupplierProduct to record that a product can be obtained from a supplier.
> A
> > SupplierProduct should have associated QuantityBreaks and ProductPrices,
> as
> > described in the Data Model Resource Book.
> > - lastPrice in SupplierProduct is used both for the last price we
> obtained
> > the product, and an agreed price. These are two separate things. Given
> the
> > lastPrice might have been determined by an agreement that has expired,
> and
> > by a quantity that we are not ordering this time, it's not very useful.
> It
> > ought to be possible to determine the most recent prices we paid at
> various
> > quantity breaks for a given product from a given supplier
>
> Actually in OFBiz the "lastPrice" is meant to be just that, the last known
> price from the supplier. It isn't meant to represent any sort of purchase
> agreement. The Agreement* entities should be used for that (though I don't
> know off the top of my head if that is current supported in the OFBiz
> purchase order code).
>

Agreement entities are not currently supported for purchase pricing. See
https://fisheye6.atlassian.com/browse/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/src/org/ofbiz/product/price/PriceServices.java?hb=true#to1323.
What's provided in the data model and what Ofbiz code currently does
are
not always the same thing. lastPrice is used for purchase prices, and it
takes no account of quantities.

Re your SupplierProduct in Mantle: it has a price and minimumQuantity
attributes. Doesn't that mean that if a supplier offers different prices for
different quantities, there must be two or more SupplierProducts? Wouldn't
it be better to have two different entities, one to record that a product
can be obtained from a supplier, and a separate one for prices at various
quantities? There would be a one-to-many between the former and the latter.

> TaxAuthorityRateProduct

> > -------------------------------------
> >
> > - This entity is used to determine tax on shipping and promotional
> pricing
> > adjustments, when these are not products. There should be a separate
> entity
> > for tax on all order adjustments, which will determine tax based on the
> > adjustment type rather than on the product category
>
> Yes, agreed. In the Mantle UDM I changed the name to
> "TaxAuthorityRateSales":
>
>
> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/AccountingOtherEntities.xml
>
> > - The ProductStore is used to determine the tax payable. That’s fine for
> > sales, but makes no sense for purchases. Really, the ProductStore is a
> proxy
> > for the geo of the seller. TaxAuthorityRateProduct should be revised to
> list
> > the geo of the seller rather than the ProductStore, then the same rules
> > could be used by purchases as well as sales. For a sale, the ProductStore
> > geo would be used as the geo of the seller.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean about the geo of the seller thingy. The geo used
> on TaxAuthorityRateProduct is the taxAuthorityGeoId where the customer is
> shipping to (or billing to) a geo where there is a PartyTaxAuthInfo (or
> Mantle TaxAuthorityParty) record where the seller organization has
> isNexus=Y.
>

I'm talking about the "buyer" and the "seller" because, for VAT/GST taxes,
we need to support tax on purchases as well as sales. For a purchase, we're
the buyer and the supplier is the seller. For a sale, the customer is the
buyer, we're the seller.

TARP *should* be used for both purchases and sales, because what it's really
capturing are tax rules we care about, and they don't change just because
we're buying something instead of selling it. Governments define taxes in
terms of the geographical location of the buyer and the seller, and of
course a government doesn't know or care about our product stores.

TARP can manage rules based on the geographical location of the buyer, but
only has the product store for the seller. That's OK for sales, but breaks
down for purchases. I think TARP should have attributes for the geographical
location of both the buyer and the seller. In effect, I think the product
store is a proxy for the geographical location of the seller. I'm happy to
leave the product store in TARP if people think it's useful.

While we're talking about TARP, I am unsure whether it should also have
flags to say if the tax should be applied to purchases, sales or both, or if
the tax type should drive that, so a tax type of SALES_TAX will be taken to
apply only to sales, and a tax type of VAT_TAX will apply to both purchases
and sales.

As for the productStoreId field, it should only be used as an extra
> constraint on the "rule" record, and should be fine if null (from the model
> perspective, the code may not currently behave that way).
>

> David E Jones-4 wrote:
>>
>> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>>
>> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>>
>> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over
>> the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or
>> that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them
>> below...
>>
>> -David
>>
>> ========================================================
>>
>> - Rename *Role entities to *Party
>> - Remove *Attribute and *TypeAttr entities (not generally a good practice
>> to use)
>> - Remove all status history (*Status) and just using audit on the

statusId

>> field
>> - ProductPrice add quantity breaks, change PK to single field sequenced
>> - Get rid of QuantityBreak and use the two simple fields instead in each
>> place used
>> - Get rid of ProdCatalog*, rework it to ProductStoreCategory, ie directly
>> associate to the store
>> - Change OrderItemShipGrpInvRes to InventoryReservation, change PK to
>> single field sequenced
>> - Change Quote to be other types of Order
>> - Make Return more like Invoice (ie no adjustment, just use items for
>> everything)
>> - Instead of OrderItemType, OrderAdjustmentType, InvoiceItemType,
>> ReturnItemType just use Shared ItemType everywhere
>> - PartyRelationship simplify (single sequenced ID)
>>
>> - Make prefixes consistent (no suffixes), ie toPartyId instead of
>> partyIdTo, etc
>> - Change all relationships to PartyRole to be type one-nofk; use plain

one

>> for Party and RoleType
>> - Move most *Type entities to Enumeration values (update seed data,
>> referring
>>  entities, remove *Type) (after this remove all remaining hasTable
>> fields)
>> - Rework PhysicalInventory and InventoryVariance to simplify, reduce
>> dependency on InventoryItem
>> - Review use of Appl, Assoc (look at book, make sure consistent)
>> - Add PartyIdentification entity, get rid of various fields and other
>> entities (maybe even PartyTaxAuthority...)
>> - Change GoodIdentification to ProductIdentification
>> - Combine PartyContactMechPurpose and PartyContactMech (remove, only use
>> entity with purpose, name PartyContactMech)
>> - Get rid of NoteData, put noteText very-long field directly on various
>> *Note entities
>> - Review all entities with large PKs (esp 4+ fields)
>> - Review and do something with all createOn/By lastUpdateOn/By fields,
>> maybe add an auditing flag for the entity instead of just for a field
>> - CustRequest to Request
>> - FinAccount to FinancialAccount
>> - Invoice handle recurrence? (was using RecurrenceInfo)
>> - Get rid of optional ProductFeature concept (conf/etc products much
>> better model)
>> - Instead of various *Term entities and mapping, just use OrderTerm
>> everywhere
>> - Cleanup/reorg ShipmentCostEstimate, CarrierShipmentMethod, etc, etc
>> - Agreement - make price list easier/cleaner
>> - Remove all createdDate, createdByUserLogin, lastModifiedDate,
>> lastModifiedByUserLogin fields (use framework defaults, audit-log)
>> - Product clean up: move dimenstions to new entity, remove content

fields,
>> etc
>> - Trim down big entities like Product, WorkEffort, etc; for groups of
>> similar fields use a more normalized structure
>>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Discussion-Potential-Data-Model-Improvements-tp3390620p3422000.html
> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

[Jacques Le Roux-3]

Paul Foxworthy wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> Many thanks for your comments.
>
> My responses inline....
>
> Cheers
>
> Paul Foxworthy
>
> On Apr 2, 2011, at 5:41 AM, Paul Foxworthy wrote:
>>
>>> Status History
>>> ---------------------
>>>
>>> I can see the sense in having one repository for all change tracking. We
>>> just need to bear in mind there are more use cases for using the information
>>> in the repository than “auditing”. Auditing is a security activity, and it
>>> will be security professionals looking at a history of who did what. Looking
>>> at a status history could well be a business activity with no security
>>> dimension to it. So viewing the history of changes to an order’s status
>>> might be something a manager would do.
>>>
>>> We would need to structure permissions so that people who need some of the
>>> information for business purposes can use it even though they are not
>>> security professionals. The other thing to observe is that status history is
>>> currently *on* by default in Ofbiz, and auditing is *off* by default.
>>
>> The "audit log" is a pretty general term and does not imply restricted
>> access to the information. Control of access to any database information is
>> up to the application developer, and nothing about the term "audit log"
>> prevents that.
>>
>
> Cool. Do you think it would be a good idea to have limited auditing enabled
> from the beginning in a demo/starter system, the rough equivalent of the
> current status history?

IMO, this could be interesting as a POC demo. Could be used on Example entity only for instance.

>
>>> QuantityBreak
>>> ---------------------
>>>
>>> No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be used as part
>>> of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that apply
>>> to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer various
>>> agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks consistently.
>>> It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having to
>>> define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity breaks
>>> are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.
>>
>> Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak
>> entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly simplifies
>> both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct, that
>> quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't happened in
>> any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that
>> actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for the user
>> they are cumbersome).
>>
>> If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can
>> certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even with the
>> data model designed this way.
>>
>
> QuantityBreak is also used for shipping, and quantity breaks for shipping
> are often in terms of weight. I think that's sensible, and the entity should
> not be removed altogether.

I'm not quite suire I get clearly which were the 2 quantity fields you spoke about David, I guess it's for pricing and shipping?
Then, I tend to agree with Paul here about keeping the QuantityBreak Entity even if we could refactor the code to use the 2 fields
(did not look into code and I don't remember OTTOMH). They could still be useful in some specific cases.

> For product pricing as opposed to shipping, how about keeping QuantityBreak,
> but only to support UIs? Remove the relationship between QuantityBreak and
> product pricing. What does everyone think?

Yes that sounds good to me. The best way would be to provide a patch in a Jira.  If it's not used OOTB (Paul's assertion, to be
confirmed) then I think we don't need to provide a way for data migration
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration

>> Purchase and Sales Agreements
>>> -----------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> - the AgreementItem has the currency for prices. The currency should be on
>>> individual AgreementProductAppls. It should be possible to have agreed
>>> prices in various currencies for a product
>>
>>> - AgreementProductAppl should have its own from and thru dates. A particular
>>> price might have a different timespan than the Agreement or (in the case of
>>> a purchase agreement) the SupplierProduct. You could imagine an agreement
>>> spanning a year with a list of special prices, each of which is available
>>> for one month
>>
>> This is a good point, it would be good to have prices in multiple
>> currencies in the same agreement, I'm modifying the AgreementItemProduct
>> entity in the Mantle data model to support that and in general be more like
>> the ProductPrice entity.

So this is for Mantle work only?

>> On second thought, after looking at the model, I like them (currency,
>> from/thru dates) on the AgreementItem better since it can apply to multiple
>> things and agreements may be better organized if price lists for different
>> currencies and date ranges are under different items (and the actual data is
>> a lot cleaner).
>>
>
> I think, as a general proposition, a price should have a currency. It's
> meaningless without. AgreementItem is an organising principle for components
> of an overall agreement, and it should be up to the user to define agreement
> items in whatever way makes sense to them. If a company using Ofbiz prices
> their products in many different currencies, what you've suggested fragments
> product prices into many different agreement items. The currency that a
> product happens to be priced in is not necessarily the most important
> organising principle for agreed prices.
>
> Similarly, from and thru dates might be useful on individual
> AgreementProductAppls. Think about the situation where we have an agreement
> for a year with a special-of the-month, a special agreed price for a
> different product each month. Does that on its own justify twelve
> AgreementItems?
>
> I have no problem with an AgreementItem having *default* from date, thru
> date and currency. When we enter an AgreementProductAppl for the
> AgreementItem, the defaults obtained from the AgreementItem should be
> visible, but they should be editable.

This is not an easy choice. It looks logical to have the currency with the price value, but on the other hand the currency may apply
to many AgreementProductAppl. Having them editable sounds good to me, as ever words are good code is better => patch in Jira

>
>>> - There’s no way at present to have a quantity break associated with an
>>> agreed price for a sales agreement. Quantity breaks are currently within the
>>> SupplierProduct entity, so are available for purchase agreements, but not
>>> sales agreements.
>>
>> Actually, that's not quite true. The current AgreementProductAppl model is
>> cumbersome, but this last point IS supported (ie agreement-based sales
>> pricing with quantity breaks) in both the OFBiz data model and the sales
>> order code.
>>
>
> From what I've found:
>
> - At
> https://fisheye6.atlassian.com/browse/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/src/org/ofbiz/product/price/PriceServices.java?hb=true#to247,
> I think the product pricing code just looks for the first
> AgreementProductAppl with no regard for quantities.
>
> - As far as I can tell the QuantityBreak entity is only currently used for
> shipping calculations, not pricing.
>
> - The ProductPriceRule entity can hold a number of ProductPriceCond
> conditions, including a test for the party and for the quantity, but
> ProductPriceRules aren't related to Agreements, and they are only used for
> sales, not purchases.
>
> I assume you're talking about the QuantityBreak entity being used for
> agreement-based sales pricing. Can you point me to where in the code that
> happens?
>
> In the data model I'm working on this is simplified and much more clear. See
>> the "AgreementItemProduct" entity here:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/PartyEntities.xml
>>
>>
>>> SupplierProduct
>>> -----------------------
>>>
>>> - As David says, a five-attribute primary key is unwieldy. It should be
>>> replaced with a simple ID.

Agree also, but I don't know what it would mean in term of change... I begin to better understand David's decision. It's not only
about framework depencies on application but also about data model refactoring...

>> Agreed. Here is my current take on the SupplierProduct entity:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/ProductInventoryEntities.xml
>>
>>> - SupplierProduct has a minimumQuantity attribute, so must be read in
>>> combination with other SupplierProducts. SupplierProduct should *not* have
>>> any information on quantity breaks. There should be just one instance of
>>> SupplierProduct to record that a product can be obtained from a supplier. A
>>> SupplierProduct should have associated QuantityBreaks and ProductPrices, as
>>> described in the Data Model Resource Book.
>>> - lastPrice in SupplierProduct is used both for the last price we obtained
>>> the product, and an agreed price. These are two separate things. Given the
>>> lastPrice might have been determined by an agreement that has expired, and
>>> by a quantity that we are not ordering this time, it's not very useful. It
>>> ought to be possible to determine the most recent prices we paid at various
>>> quantity breaks for a given product from a given supplier
>>
>> Actually in OFBiz the "lastPrice" is meant to be just that, the last known
>> price from the supplier. It isn't meant to represent any sort of purchase
>> agreement. The Agreement* entities should be used for that (though I don't
>> know off the top of my head if that is current supported in the OFBiz
>> purchase order code).
>>
>
> Agreement entities are not currently supported for purchase pricing. See
> https://fisheye6.atlassian.com/browse/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/src/org/ofbiz/product/price/PriceServices.java?hb=true#to1323.
> What's provided in the data model and what Ofbiz code currently does
> are
> not always the same thing. lastPrice is used for purchase prices, and it
> takes no account of quantities.
>
> Re your SupplierProduct in Mantle: it has a price and minimumQuantity
> attributes. Doesn't that mean that if a supplier offers different prices for
> different quantities, there must be two or more SupplierProducts? Wouldn't
> it be better to have two different entities, one to record that a product
> can be obtained from a supplier, and a separate one for prices at various
> quantities? There would be a one-to-many between the former and the latter.
>
>> TaxAuthorityRateProduct
>
>>> -------------------------------------
>>>
>>> - This entity is used to determine tax on shipping and promotional pricing
>>> adjustments, when these are not products. There should be a separate entity
>>> for tax on all order adjustments, which will determine tax based on the
>>> adjustment type rather than on the product category

On this subject, at r1070830 I have committed Paul's patch with a simple information on screen to handle the shipping/promotion case
(only one line). Keeping the curent data model, ideally a js script would enforce this case.

>> Yes, agreed. In the Mantle UDM I changed the name to
>> "TaxAuthorityRateSales":
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/AccountingOtherEntities.xml
>>
>>> - The ProductStore is used to determine the tax payable. That’s fine for
>>> sales, but makes no sense for purchases. Really, the ProductStore is a proxy
>>> for the geo of the seller. TaxAuthorityRateProduct should be revised to list
>>> the geo of the seller rather than the ProductStore, then the same rules
>>> could be used by purchases as well as sales. For a sale, the ProductStore
>>> geo would be used as the geo of the seller.
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean about the geo of the seller thingy. The geo used
>> on TaxAuthorityRateProduct is the taxAuthorityGeoId where the customer is
>> shipping to (or billing to) a geo where there is a PartyTaxAuthInfo (or
>> Mantle TaxAuthorityParty) record where the seller organization has
>> isNexus=Y.
>>
>
> I'm talking about the "buyer" and the "seller" because, for VAT/GST taxes,
> we need to support tax on purchases as well as sales. For a purchase, we're
> the buyer and the supplier is the seller. For a sale, the customer is the
> buyer, we're the seller.
>
> TARP *should* be used for both purchases and sales, because what it's really
> capturing are tax rules we care about, and they don't change just because
> we're buying something instead of selling it. Governments define taxes in
> terms of the geographical location of the buyer and the seller, and of
> course a government doesn't know or care about our product stores.
>
> TARP can manage rules based on the geographical location of the buyer, but
> only has the product store for the seller. That's OK for sales, but breaks
> down for purchases. I think TARP should have attributes for the geographical
> location of both the buyer and the seller. In effect, I think the product
> store is a proxy for the geographical location of the seller. I'm happy to
> leave the product store in TARP if people think it's useful.
>
> While we're talking about TARP, I am unsure whether it should also have
> flags to say if the tax should be applied to purchases, sales or both, or if
> the tax type should drive that, so a tax type of SALES_TAX will be taken to
> apply only to sales, and a tax type of VAT_TAX will apply to both purchases
> and sales.

I see VAT taxes as a cascade down to Governments. So you don't have to care about the seller, he has to care about you. I don't see
the point of handling VAT for purchase, since you will not generate the invoice for the purchase, the seller will. What is is needed
for, to have an idea about the costs? Then maybe we should think about creating a Cost Center as we have a Profit Center with the
ProductStore...

Jacques

> As for the productStoreId field, it should only be used as an extra
>> constraint on the "rule" record, and should be fine if null (from the model
>> perspective, the code may not currently behave that way).
>>
>
>> David E Jones-4 wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>>>
>>> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>>>
>>> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over
>>> the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or
>>> that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them
>>> below...
>>>
>>> -David
>>>
>>> ========================================================
>>>
>>> - Rename *Role entities to *Party
>>> - Remove *Attribute and *TypeAttr entities (not generally a good practice
>>> to use)
>>> - Remove all status history (*Status) and just using audit on the
> statusId
>>> field
>>> - ProductPrice add quantity breaks, change PK to single field sequenced
>>> - Get rid of QuantityBreak and use the two simple fields instead in each
>>> place used
>>> - Get rid of ProdCatalog*, rework it to ProductStoreCategory, ie directly
>>> associate to the store
>>> - Change OrderItemShipGrpInvRes to InventoryReservation, change PK to
>>> single field sequenced
>>> - Change Quote to be other types of Order
>>> - Make Return more like Invoice (ie no adjustment, just use items for
>>> everything)
>>> - Instead of OrderItemType, OrderAdjustmentType, InvoiceItemType,
>>> ReturnItemType just use Shared ItemType everywhere
>>> - PartyRelationship simplify (single sequenced ID)
>>>
>>> - Make prefixes consistent (no suffixes), ie toPartyId instead of
>>> partyIdTo, etc
>>> - Change all relationships to PartyRole to be type one-nofk; use plain
> one
>>> for Party and RoleType
>>> - Move most *Type entities to Enumeration values (update seed data,
>>> referring
>>>  entities, remove *Type) (after this remove all remaining hasTable
>>> fields)
>>> - Rework PhysicalInventory and InventoryVariance to simplify, reduce
>>> dependency on InventoryItem
>>> - Review use of Appl, Assoc (look at book, make sure consistent)
>>> - Add PartyIdentification entity, get rid of various fields and other
>>> entities (maybe even PartyTaxAuthority...)
>>> - Change GoodIdentification to ProductIdentification
>>> - Combine PartyContactMechPurpose and PartyContactMech (remove, only use
>>> entity with purpose, name PartyContactMech)
>>> - Get rid of NoteData, put noteText very-long field directly on various
>>> *Note entities
>>> - Review all entities with large PKs (esp 4+ fields)
>>> - Review and do something with all createOn/By lastUpdateOn/By fields,
>>> maybe add an auditing flag for the entity instead of just for a field
>>> - CustRequest to Request
>>> - FinAccount to FinancialAccount
>>> - Invoice handle recurrence? (was using RecurrenceInfo)
>>> - Get rid of optional ProductFeature concept (conf/etc products much
>>> better model)
>>> - Instead of various *Term entities and mapping, just use OrderTerm
>>> everywhere
>>> - Cleanup/reorg ShipmentCostEstimate, CarrierShipmentMethod, etc, etc
>>> - Agreement - make price list easier/cleaner
>>> - Remove all createdDate, createdByUserLogin, lastModifiedDate,
>>> lastModifiedByUserLogin fields (use framework defaults, audit-log)
>>> - Product clean up: move dimenstions to new entity, remove content
> fields,
>>> etc
>>> - Trim down big entities like Product, WorkEffort, etc; for groups of
>>> similar fields use a more normalized structure
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context:
> http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Discussion-Potential-Data-Model-Improvements-tp3390620p3422000.html
>> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

[Paul Foxworthy]

Thanks Jacques.

My comments inline...

Cheers

Paul Foxworthy

Jacques Le Roux-3 wrote

Paul Foxworthy wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Many thanks for your comments.
>
> My responses inline....
>
> Cheers
>
> Paul Foxworthy
>
> On Apr 2, 2011, at 5:41 AM, Paul Foxworthy wrote:
>>
>>> Status History
>>> ---------------------
>>>
>>> I can see the sense in having one repository for all change tracking. We
>>> just need to bear in mind there are more use cases for using the information
>>> in the repository than “auditing”. Auditing is a security activity, and it
>>> will be security professionals looking at a history of who did what. Looking
>>> at a status history could well be a business activity with no security
>>> dimension to it. So viewing the history of changes to an order’s status
>>> might be something a manager would do.
>>>
>>> We would need to structure permissions so that people who need some of the
>>> information for business purposes can use it even though they are not
>>> security professionals. The other thing to observe is that status history is
>>> currently *on* by default in Ofbiz, and auditing is *off* by default.
>>
>> The "audit log" is a pretty general term and does not imply restricted
>> access to the information. Control of access to any database information is
>> up to the application developer, and nothing about the term "audit log"
>> prevents that.
>>
>
> Cool. Do you think it would be a good idea to have limited auditing enabled
> from the beginning in a demo/starter system, the rough equivalent of the
> current status history?

IMO, this could be interesting as a POC demo. Could be used on Example entity only for instance.

>
>>> QuantityBreak
>>> ---------------------
>>>
>>> No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be used as part
>>> of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that apply
>>> to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer various
>>> agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks consistently.
>>> It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having to
>>> define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity breaks
>>> are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.
>>
>> Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak
>> entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly simplifies
>> both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct, that
>> quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't happened in
>> any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that
>> actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for the user
>> they are cumbersome).
>>
>> If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can
>> certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even with the
>> data model designed this way.
>>
>
> QuantityBreak is also used for shipping, and quantity breaks for shipping
> are often in terms of weight. I think that's sensible, and the entity should
> not be removed altogether.

I'm not quite suire I get clearly which were the 2 quantity fields you spoke about David, I guess it's for pricing and shipping?
Then, I tend to agree with Paul here about keeping the QuantityBreak Entity even if we could refactor the code to use the 2 fields
(did not look into code and I don't remember OTTOMH). They could still be useful in some specific cases.

> For product pricing as opposed to shipping, how about keeping QuantityBreak,
> but only to support UIs? Remove the relationship between QuantityBreak and
> product pricing. What does everyone think?

Yes that sounds good to me. The best way would be to provide a patch in a Jira.  If it's not used OOTB (Paul's assertion, to be
confirmed) then I think we don't need to provide a way for data migration
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration

>> Purchase and Sales Agreements
>>> -----------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> - the AgreementItem has the currency for prices. The currency should be on
>>> individual AgreementProductAppls. It should be possible to have agreed
>>> prices in various currencies for a product
>>
>>> - AgreementProductAppl should have its own from and thru dates. A particular
>>> price might have a different timespan than the Agreement or (in the case of
>>> a purchase agreement) the SupplierProduct. You could imagine an agreement
>>> spanning a year with a list of special prices, each of which is available
>>> for one month
>>
>> This is a good point, it would be good to have prices in multiple
>> currencies in the same agreement, I'm modifying the AgreementItemProduct
>> entity in the Mantle data model to support that and in general be more like
>> the ProductPrice entity.

So this is for Mantle work only?

>> On second thought, after looking at the model, I like them (currency,
>> from/thru dates) on the AgreementItem better since it can apply to multiple
>> things and agreements may be better organized if price lists for different
>> currencies and date ranges are under different items (and the actual data is
>> a lot cleaner).
>>
>
> I think, as a general proposition, a price should have a currency. It's
> meaningless without. AgreementItem is an organising principle for components
> of an overall agreement, and it should be up to the user to define agreement
> items in whatever way makes sense to them. If a company using Ofbiz prices
> their products in many different currencies, what you've suggested fragments
> product prices into many different agreement items. The currency that a
> product happens to be priced in is not necessarily the most important
> organising principle for agreed prices.
>
> Similarly, from and thru dates might be useful on individual
> AgreementProductAppls. Think about the situation where we have an agreement
> for a year with a special-of the-month, a special agreed price for a
> different product each month. Does that on its own justify twelve
> AgreementItems?
>
> I have no problem with an AgreementItem having *default* from date, thru
> date and currency. When we enter an AgreementProductAppl for the
> AgreementItem, the defaults obtained from the AgreementItem should be
> visible, but they should be editable.

This is not an easy choice. It looks logical to have the currency with the price value, but on the other hand the currency may apply
to many AgreementProductAppl. Having them editable sounds good to me, as ever words are good code is better => patch in Jira

>
>>> - There’s no way at present to have a quantity break associated with an
>>> agreed price for a sales agreement. Quantity breaks are currently within the
>>> SupplierProduct entity, so are available for purchase agreements, but not
>>> sales agreements.
>>
>> Actually, that's not quite true. The current AgreementProductAppl model is
>> cumbersome, but this last point IS supported (ie agreement-based sales
>> pricing with quantity breaks) in both the OFBiz data model and the sales
>> order code.
>>
>
> From what I've found:
>
> - At
> https://fisheye6.atlassian.com/browse/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/src/org/ofbiz/product/price/PriceServices.java?hb=true#to247,
> I think the product pricing code just looks for the first
> AgreementProductAppl with no regard for quantities.
>
> - As far as I can tell the QuantityBreak entity is only currently used for
> shipping calculations, not pricing.
>
> - The ProductPriceRule entity can hold a number of ProductPriceCond
> conditions, including a test for the party and for the quantity, but
> ProductPriceRules aren't related to Agreements, and they are only used for
> sales, not purchases.
>
> I assume you're talking about the QuantityBreak entity being used for
> agreement-based sales pricing. Can you point me to where in the code that
> happens?

I would still like to know if I've missed somewhere where this happens.

Jacques Le Roux-3 wrote

>
> In the data model I'm working on this is simplified and much more clear. See
>> the "AgreementItemProduct" entity here:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/PartyEntities.xml
>>
>>
>>> SupplierProduct
>>> -----------------------
>>>
>>> - As David says, a five-attribute primary key is unwieldy. It should be
>>> replaced with a simple ID.

Agree also, but I don't know what it would mean in term of change... I begin to better understand David's decision. It's not only
about framework depencies on application but also about data model refactoring...


>> Agreed. Here is my current take on the SupplierProduct entity:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/ProductInventoryEntities.xml
>>
>>> - SupplierProduct has a minimumQuantity attribute, so must be read in
>>> combination with other SupplierProducts. SupplierProduct should *not* have
>>> any information on quantity breaks. There should be just one instance of
>>> SupplierProduct to record that a product can be obtained from a supplier. A
>>> SupplierProduct should have associated QuantityBreaks and ProductPrices, as
>>> described in the Data Model Resource Book.
>>> - lastPrice in SupplierProduct is used both for the last price we obtained
>>> the product, and an agreed price. These are two separate things. Given the
>>> lastPrice might have been determined by an agreement that has expired, and
>>> by a quantity that we are not ordering this time, it's not very useful. It
>>> ought to be possible to determine the most recent prices we paid at various
>>> quantity breaks for a given product from a given supplier
>>
>> Actually in OFBiz the "lastPrice" is meant to be just that, the last known
>> price from the supplier. It isn't meant to represent any sort of purchase
>> agreement. The Agreement* entities should be used for that (though I don't
>> know off the top of my head if that is current supported in the OFBiz
>> purchase order code).
>>
>
> Agreement entities are not currently supported for purchase pricing. See
> https://fisheye6.atlassian.com/browse/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/src/org/ofbiz/product/price/PriceServices.java?hb=true#to1323.
> What's provided in the data model and what Ofbiz code currently does
> are
> not always the same thing. lastPrice is used for purchase prices, and it
> takes no account of quantities.
>
> Re your SupplierProduct in Mantle: it has a price and minimumQuantity
> attributes. Doesn't that mean that if a supplier offers different prices for
> different quantities, there must be two or more SupplierProducts? Wouldn't
> it be better to have two different entities, one to record that a product
> can be obtained from a supplier, and a separate one for prices at various
> quantities? There would be a one-to-many between the former and the latter.

Any opinions on this proposition:

For any given product obtainable from a given supplier, there should be one and only one occurrence of SupplierProduct. Quantity breaks belong somewhere else.

What do people think?

Jacques Le Roux-3 wrote

>
>> TaxAuthorityRateProduct
>
>>> -------------------------------------
>>>
>>> - This entity is used to determine tax on shipping and promotional pricing
>>> adjustments, when these are not products. There should be a separate entity
>>> for tax on all order adjustments, which will determine tax based on the
>>> adjustment type rather than on the product category

On this subject, at r1070830 I have committed Paul's patch with a simple information on screen to handle the shipping/promotion case
(only one line). Keeping the curent data model, ideally a js script would enforce this case.

>> Yes, agreed. In the Mantle UDM I changed the name to
>> "TaxAuthorityRateSales":
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/entity/AccountingOtherEntities.xml
>>
>>> - The ProductStore is used to determine the tax payable. That’s fine for
>>> sales, but makes no sense for purchases. Really, the ProductStore is a proxy
>>> for the geo of the seller. TaxAuthorityRateProduct should be revised to list
>>> the geo of the seller rather than the ProductStore, then the same rules
>>> could be used by purchases as well as sales. For a sale, the ProductStore
>>> geo would be used as the geo of the seller.
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean about the geo of the seller thingy. The geo used
>> on TaxAuthorityRateProduct is the taxAuthorityGeoId where the customer is
>> shipping to (or billing to) a geo where there is a PartyTaxAuthInfo (or
>> Mantle TaxAuthorityParty) record where the seller organization has
>> isNexus=Y.
>>
>
> I'm talking about the "buyer" and the "seller" because, for VAT/GST taxes,
> we need to support tax on purchases as well as sales. For a purchase, we're
> the buyer and the supplier is the seller. For a sale, the customer is the
> buyer, we're the seller.
>
> TARP *should* be used for both purchases and sales, because what it's really
> capturing are tax rules we care about, and they don't change just because
> we're buying something instead of selling it. Governments define taxes in
> terms of the geographical location of the buyer and the seller, and of
> course a government doesn't know or care about our product stores.
>
> TARP can manage rules based on the geographical location of the buyer, but
> only has the product store for the seller. That's OK for sales, but breaks
> down for purchases. I think TARP should have attributes for the geographical
> location of both the buyer and the seller. In effect, I think the product
> store is a proxy for the geographical location of the seller. I'm happy to
> leave the product store in TARP if people think it's useful.
>
> While we're talking about TARP, I am unsure whether it should also have
> flags to say if the tax should be applied to purchases, sales or both, or if
> the tax type should drive that, so a tax type of SALES_TAX will be taken to
> apply only to sales, and a tax type of VAT_TAX will apply to both purchases
> and sales.

I see VAT taxes as a cascade down to Governments. So you don't have to care about the seller, he has to care about you. I don't see
the point of handling VAT for purchase, since you will not generate the invoice for the purchase, the seller will. What is is needed
for, to have an idea about the costs? Then maybe we should think about creating a Cost Center as we have a Profit Center with the
ProductStore...

Jacques

Yes, when we create a purchase order, we are only *estimating* the tax. The key document that defines the tax we will pay is the supplier's invoice. When we receive the invoice, we may need to revise the tax we're paying.

But, if we have accurate pricing information from the supplier, the tax *can* be estimated and is useful information.

If I choose to send payment with the order rather than waiting for an invoice, an estimate of the tax is useful so I can make one inclusive payment.

In Australia at least, you can choose to account for the GST on an accrual basis. Large companies must use accrual. That means that tax is calculated based on purchase orders and invoices, rather than on payments. In short, the tax is levied earlier based on payment obligations, rather than later on the actual payments. If I create a purchase order on the last day of the quarter, I darned well want the tax I will pay to reduce my GST for this quarter. An estimate is far better than nothing. I can always put in an adjustment later on when the invoice arrives from the supplier.

I don't quite understand your mention of Cost Centers. Do you mean there should be General Ledger accounts for the VAT/GST we have paid on purchases? If that's what you mean, I agree.

Jacques Le Roux-3 wrote

> As for the productStoreId field, it should only be used as an extra
>> constraint on the "rule" record, and should be fine if null (from the model
>> perspective, the code may not currently behave that way).
>>
>
>> David E Jones-4 wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>>>
>>> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>>>
>>> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over
>>> the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or
>>> that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them
>>> below...
>>>
>>> -David
>>>
>>> ========================================================
>>>
>>> - Rename *Role entities to *Party
>>> - Remove *Attribute and *TypeAttr entities (not generally a good practice
>>> to use)
>>> - Remove all status history (*Status) and just using audit on the
> statusId
>>> field
>>> - ProductPrice add quantity breaks, change PK to single field sequenced
>>> - Get rid of QuantityBreak and use the two simple fields instead in each
>>> place used
>>> - Get rid of ProdCatalog*, rework it to ProductStoreCategory, ie directly
>>> associate to the store
>>> - Change OrderItemShipGrpInvRes to InventoryReservation, change PK to
>>> single field sequenced
>>> - Change Quote to be other types of Order
>>> - Make Return more like Invoice (ie no adjustment, just use items for
>>> everything)
>>> - Instead of OrderItemType, OrderAdjustmentType, InvoiceItemType,
>>> ReturnItemType just use Shared ItemType everywhere
>>> - PartyRelationship simplify (single sequenced ID)
>>>
>>> - Make prefixes consistent (no suffixes), ie toPartyId instead of
>>> partyIdTo, etc
>>> - Change all relationships to PartyRole to be type one-nofk; use plain
> one
>>> for Party and RoleType
>>> - Move most *Type entities to Enumeration values (update seed data,
>>> referring
>>>  entities, remove *Type) (after this remove all remaining hasTable
>>> fields)
>>> - Rework PhysicalInventory and InventoryVariance to simplify, reduce
>>> dependency on InventoryItem
>>> - Review use of Appl, Assoc (look at book, make sure consistent)
>>> - Add PartyIdentification entity, get rid of various fields and other
>>> entities (maybe even PartyTaxAuthority...)
>>> - Change GoodIdentification to ProductIdentification
>>> - Combine PartyContactMechPurpose and PartyContactMech (remove, only use
>>> entity with purpose, name PartyContactMech)
>>> - Get rid of NoteData, put noteText very-long field directly on various
>>> *Note entities
>>> - Review all entities with large PKs (esp 4+ fields)
>>> - Review and do something with all createOn/By lastUpdateOn/By fields,
>>> maybe add an auditing flag for the entity instead of just for a field
>>> - CustRequest to Request
>>> - FinAccount to FinancialAccount
>>> - Invoice handle recurrence? (was using RecurrenceInfo)
>>> - Get rid of optional ProductFeature concept (conf/etc products much
>>> better model)
>>> - Instead of various *Term entities and mapping, just use OrderTerm
>>> everywhere
>>> - Cleanup/reorg ShipmentCostEstimate, CarrierShipmentMethod, etc, etc
>>> - Agreement - make price list easier/cleaner
>>> - Remove all createdDate, createdByUserLogin, lastModifiedDate,
>>> lastModifiedByUserLogin fields (use framework defaults, audit-log)
>>> - Product clean up: move dimenstions to new entity, remove content
> fields,
>>> etc
>>> - Trim down big entities like Product, WorkEffort, etc; for groups of
>>> similar fields use a more normalized structure
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context:
> http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Discussion-Potential-Data-Model-Improvements-tp3390620p3422000.html
>> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

[Paul Foxworthy]

Further to my last post re VAT/GST on purchase orders...

I have double-checked and I was wrong about accounting for Australian GST from purchase orders. When a business chooses accrual accounting, it is always the sending or arrival of an invoice that changes your GST-related liability . Smaller businesses have the option of cash accounting, where actual payments, not invoices, change the liability.

Sorry for the mistake.

I still think estimating the tax when a purchase order is created is useful. We would know what we expect to pay in total, and if we choose to send payment with the purchase order, the payment would be tax-inclusive.

Cheers

Paul Foxworthy

[Adrian Crum-3]

On 3/19/2011 8:33 PM, David E Jones wrote:

> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>
> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>
> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them below...
>
> -David
>
> ========================================================
> - CustRequest to Request

+1000

That entity is a mess. Some of its fields duplicate its related
entities. I prefer the model in the DMRB.

-Adrian

[Adrian Crum-3]

On 3/19/2011 8:33 PM, David E Jones wrote:

> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>
> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>
> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them below...
>
> -David
>
> ========================================================
> - Get rid of NoteData, put noteText very-long field directly on various *Note entities
>

-1

I prefer the many-to-many relationship. A note might apply to more than
one entity.

-Adrian

[Malin Nicolas]

My comments inline...

[...]

>>>>> QuantityBreak
>>>>> ---------------------
>>>>>
>>>>> No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be used as
>>>>> part
>>>>> of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that
>>>>> apply
>>>>> to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer
>>>>> various
>>>>> agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks
>>>>> consistently.
>>>>> It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having
>>>>> to
>>>>> define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity
>>>>> breaks
>>>>> are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.
>>>> Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak
>>>> entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly
>>>> simplifies
>>>> both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct,
>>>> that
>>>> quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't happened
>>>> in
>>>> any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that
>>>> actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for the
>>>> user
>>>> they are cumbersome).
>>>>
>>>> If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can
>>>> certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even with
>>>> the
>>>> data model designed this way.
>>>>
>>> QuantityBreak is also used for shipping, and quantity breaks for shipping
>>> are often in terms of weight. I think that's sensible, and the entity
>>> should
>>> not be removed altogether.
>> I'm not quite suire I get clearly which were the 2 quantity fields you
>> spoke about David, I guess it's for pricing and shipping?
>> Then, I tend to agree with Paul here about keeping the QuantityBreak
>> Entity even if we could refactor the code to use the 2 fields
>> (did not look into code and I don't remember OTTOMH). They could still be
>> useful in some specific cases.
>>
>>> For product pricing as opposed to shipping, how about keeping
>>> QuantityBreak,
>>> but only to support UIs? Remove the relationship between QuantityBreak
>>> and
>>> product pricing. What does everyone think?
>> Yes that sounds good to me. The best way would be to provide a patch in a
>> Jira.  If it's not used OOTB (Paul's assertion, to be
>> confirmed) then I think we don't need to provide a way for data migration
>> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration

I prefere keep QuantityBreak entity to given the possibility to define
prototype input for user screen.
With QuantityBreakType it's easier to define many formated table price
depending on product type.

Nicolas

--
Nicolas MALIN
Consultant
Tél : [phone]
Site projet : http://www.neogia.org/
-------
Société LibrenBerry
Tél : [phone]
Site : http://www.librenberry.net/

[Jacques Le Roux]

From: "Nicolas Malin" <[hidden email]>

> My comments inline...
>
> [...]
>>>>>> QuantityBreak
>>>>>> ---------------------
>>>>>>
>>>>>> No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be used as
>>>>>> part
>>>>>> of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that
>>>>>> apply
>>>>>> to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer
>>>>>> various
>>>>>> agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks
>>>>>> consistently.
>>>>>> It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity
>>>>>> breaks
>>>>>> are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.
>>>>> Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak
>>>>> entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly
>>>>> simplifies
>>>>> both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct,
>>>>> that
>>>>> quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't happened
>>>>> in
>>>>> any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that
>>>>> actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for the
>>>>> user
>>>>> they are cumbersome).
>>>>>
>>>>> If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can
>>>>> certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even with
>>>>> the
>>>>> data model designed this way.
>>>>>
>>>> QuantityBreak is also used for shipping, and quantity breaks for shipping
>>>> are often in terms of weight. I think that's sensible, and the entity
>>>> should
>>>> not be removed altogether.
>>> I'm not quite suire I get clearly which were the 2 quantity fields you
>>> spoke about David, I guess it's for pricing and shipping?
>>> Then, I tend to agree with Paul here about keeping the QuantityBreak
>>> Entity even if we could refactor the code to use the 2 fields
>>> (did not look into code and I don't remember OTTOMH). They could still be
>>> useful in some specific cases.
>>>
>>>> For product pricing as opposed to shipping, how about keeping
>>>> QuantityBreak,
>>>> but only to support UIs? Remove the relationship between QuantityBreak
>>>> and
>>>> product pricing. What does everyone think?
>>> Yes that sounds good to me. The best way would be to provide a patch in a
>>> Jira.  If it's not used OOTB (Paul's assertion, to be
>>> confirmed) then I think we don't need to provide a way for data migration
>>> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration
> I prefere keep QuantityBreak entity to given the possibility to define prototype input for user screen.
> With QuantityBreakType it's easier to define many formated table price depending on product type.
>
> Nicolas

Nicolas,

Anyway, it seems to me that David was mostly inquiring possible changes for Moqui but did not expect to do the same in OFBiz. I
might be wrong...

Jacques

> --
> Nicolas MALIN
> Consultant
> Tél : [phone]
> Site projet : http://www.neogia.org/
> -------
> Société LibrenBerry
> Tél : [phone]
> Site : http://www.librenberry.net/
>

[BJ Freeman]

my understanding of ofbiz basic design is that the entity define the UI
display, which this statement does not follow.
so till the Javascript is generated on the fly in the  Webapp I consider
all efforts to integrate JS, extra effort for the reason stated here.

=========================
BJ Freeman
Strategic Power Office with Supplier Automation <http://www.businessesnetwork.com/automation/viewforum.php?f=52>
Specialtymarket.com <http://www.specialtymarket.com/>
Systems Integrator-- Glad to Assist

Chat  Y! messenger: bjfr33man


Nicolas Malin sent the following on 5/17/2011 2:05 AM:

> My comments inline...
>
> [...]
>>>>>> QuantityBreak
>>>>>> ---------------------
>>>>>>
>>>>>> No, don’t get rid of the QuantityBreak entity, and it should be
>>>>>> used as
>>>>>> part
>>>>>> of pricing. Many organisations will have standard QuantityBreaks that
>>>>>> apply
>>>>>> to a wide range of products. An organization might want to offer
>>>>>> various
>>>>>> agreed prices to customers, but use the same quantity breaks
>>>>>> consistently.
>>>>>> It should be possible to add a new price for a product without having
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> define quantity breaks, with the risk that the newly entered quantity
>>>>>> breaks
>>>>>> are inconsistent with standard organisation policy.
>>>>> Maybe this wasn't clear... the goal is to get rid of the QuantityBreak
>>>>> entity and use the quantity fields directly. This significantly
>>>>> simplifies
>>>>> both the data model and the code. In theory what you say is correct,
>>>>> that
>>>>> quantity breaks could be maintained separately, but that hasn't
>>>>> happened
>>>>> in
>>>>> any of the OFBiz UIs, and in fact I've never seen anything like that
>>>>> actually used (I've seen them built, but then abandoned because for
>>>>> the
>>>>> user
>>>>> they are cumbersome).
>>>>>
>>>>> If an organization wants a policy of specific quantity breaks they can
>>>>> certainly implement that and design the user interface for it, even
>>>>> with
>>>>> the
>>>>> data model designed this way.
>>>>>
>>>> QuantityBreak is also used for shipping, and quantity breaks for
>>>> shipping
>>>> are often in terms of weight. I think that's sensible, and the entity
>>>> should
>>>> not be removed altogether.
>>> I'm not quite suire I get clearly which were the 2 quantity fields you
>>> spoke about David, I guess it's for pricing and shipping?
>>> Then, I tend to agree with Paul here about keeping the QuantityBreak
>>> Entity even if we could refactor the code to use the 2 fields
>>> (did not look into code and I don't remember OTTOMH). They could
>>> still be
>>> useful in some specific cases.
>>>
>>>> For product pricing as opposed to shipping, how about keeping
>>>> QuantityBreak,
>>>> but only to support UIs? Remove the relationship between QuantityBreak
>>>> and
>>>> product pricing. What does everyone think?
>>> Yes that sounds good to me. The best way would be to provide a patch
>>> in a
>>> Jira.  If it's not used OOTB (Paul's assertion, to be
>>> confirmed) then I think we don't need to provide a way for data
>>> migration
>>> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration
>>>
> I prefere keep QuantityBreak entity to given the possibility to define
> prototype input for user screen.
> With QuantityBreakType it's easier to define many formated table price
> depending on product type.
>
> Nicolas
>

[Adrian Crum-3]

While working on converting a midrange legacy system to OFBiz, I've come
up with more thoughts on this...

On 3/20/2011 3:33 AM, David E Jones wrote:

> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>
> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>
> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them below...
>
> -David
>
> ========================================================
>
> - Rename *Role entities to *Party
> - Remove *Attribute and *TypeAttr entities (not generally a good practice to use)
> - Remove all status history (*Status) and just using audit on the statusId field
> - ProductPrice add quantity breaks, change PK to single field sequenced

+1 on using a sequence. Also, get rid of ProductPriceType- it is a
duplicate of SaleType.

> - Get rid of QuantityBreak and use the two simple fields instead in each place used
> - Get rid of ProdCatalog*, rework it to ProductStoreCategory, ie directly associate to the store
> - Change OrderItemShipGrpInvRes to InventoryReservation, change PK to single field sequenced
> - Change Quote to be other types of Order
> - Make Return more like Invoice (ie no adjustment, just use items for everything)
> - Instead of OrderItemType, OrderAdjustmentType, InvoiceItemType, ReturnItemType just use Shared ItemType everywhere
> - PartyRelationship simplify (single sequenced ID)
>
> - Make prefixes consistent (no suffixes), ie toPartyId instead of partyIdTo, etc
> - Change all relationships to PartyRole to be type one-nofk; use plain one for Party and RoleType
> - Move most *Type entities to Enumeration values (update seed data, referring
>    entities, remove *Type) (after this remove all remaining hasTable fields)
> - Rework PhysicalInventory and InventoryVariance to simplify, reduce dependency on InventoryItem
> - Review use of Appl, Assoc (look at book, make sure consistent)
> - Add PartyIdentification entity, get rid of various fields and other entities (maybe even PartyTaxAuthority...)
> - Change GoodIdentification to ProductIdentification

Why? The current name is from the DMRB - makes it easier to understand
what it's for.

> - Combine PartyContactMechPurpose and PartyContactMech (remove, only use entity with purpose, name PartyContactMech)
> - Get rid of NoteData, put noteText very-long field directly on various *Note entities
> - Review all entities with large PKs (esp 4+ fields)
> - Review and do something with all createOn/By lastUpdateOn/By fields, maybe add an auditing flag for the entity instead of just for a field
> - CustRequest to Request
> - FinAccount to FinancialAccount
> - Invoice handle recurrence? (was using RecurrenceInfo)
> - Get rid of optional ProductFeature concept (conf/etc products much better model)

-1 From my perspective, the ProductFeature model in the DMRB is a lot
more logical/flexible than the convoluted mess OFBiz uses.

> - Instead of various *Term entities and mapping, just use OrderTerm everywhere
> - Cleanup/reorg ShipmentCostEstimate, CarrierShipmentMethod, etc, etc
> - Agreement - make price list easier/cleaner
> - Remove all createdDate, createdByUserLogin, lastModifiedDate, lastModifiedByUserLogin fields (use framework defaults, audit-log)
> - Product clean up: move dimenstions to new entity, remove content fields, etc
> - Trim down big entities like Product, WorkEffort, etc; for groups of similar fields use a more normalized structure
>
>

[Scott Gray-2]

On 24/07/2011, at 6:56 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:

> While working on converting a midrange legacy system to OFBiz, I've come up with more thoughts on this...
>
> On 3/20/2011 3:33 AM, David E Jones wrote:
>> - Get rid of optional ProductFeature concept (conf/etc products much better model)
>
> -1 From my perspective, the ProductFeature model in the DMRB is a lot more logical/flexible than the convoluted mess OFBiz uses.

I think David is simply suggesting to get rid of the OPTIONAL_FEATURE ProductFeatureApplType and any logic associated with it, not the entire ProductFeature model.  I've never used that type so I can't really comment on it's usefulness.

[Adrian Crum-3]

On 3/20/2011 3:33 AM, David E Jones wrote:

> I'm writing this to start a thread to discuss:
>
> If you could change ANYTHING in the OFBiz data model, what would it be?
>
> To kick this off here are some ideas I've compiled that have come up over the years (many based on feedback from people on this mailing list), or that I thought of recently will working on this topic. You can see them below...
>
> -David
>
> ========================================================
>
> - Move most *Type entities to Enumeration values (update seed data, referring
>    entities, remove *Type) (after this remove all remaining hasTable fields)

I have been thinking about this one and I have come up with an idea. I
believe some of the *Type entities were meant to implement the entity
subtypes mentioned in The Data Model Resource book. In some cases, that
distinction is lost over time and the *Type entity contains values that
have nothing to do with subtyping the related entity. So, for the entity
subtype cases we could have something like an EntitySubtype entity, and
use a standard ID field name in all subtyped entities - like
entitySubTypeId. That approach could still be abused, but at least the
original intent of the id field can be preserved.

-Adrian

[Pierre Smits]

Is this subject still valid? And wouldn't it be great to have one (or some)
of the subjects on the (short-term) roadmap?

Regards,

Pierre Smits

*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com

[Jacques Le Roux]

I think it's still alive, but I bet it will not be short-term...

Jacques

On Friday, January 17, 2014 12:34 PM, [hidden email] wrote

> Is this subject still valid? And wouldn't it be great to have one (or some)
> of the subjects on the (short-term) roadmap?
>
> Regards,
>
> Pierre Smits
>
> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
> Based Manufacturing, Professional
> Services and Retail & Trade
> http://www.orrtiz.com

[David E. Jones-2]

Doing significant data model cleanups and changes is a LOT of work with a large code base and user community. All code that uses the data structure needs to be changes, and accommodations are needed for deprecating the old entity or fields and migrating data to the new ones. So yes, to the point Jacques made, it's not likely short-term and without significant investment and coordination with others in the community it is not really likely long-term either.

For years I built up a list of changes that would be nice to do in OFBiz itself, but so many are not really feasible. There may still be some of them worth doing, so for some ideas to consider here are my change notes for the Mantle data model:

https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/Planning.txt

At this point there are lots of generic services and end-to-end automated tests that use many of these changes to the data structures so they are pretty well vetted and validated and not just theoretical like when this thread started a couple years ago. One of the benefits to many of these changes is that not only is the data model smaller and cleaner, but it makes it possible to simplify or eliminate large amounts of logic layer code.

For OFBiz, along the lines of the reasons mentioned above, that would involve quite a few code changes but maybe the best way to look at it is that this is the main reason to do the data model changes (ie simplifying and eliminating code) as opposed to just changing the data model for the sake of the data model itself.

-David



On Jan 17, 2014, at 4:57 AM, Jacques Le Roux <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I think it's still alive, but I bet it will not be short-term...
>
> Jacques
>
> On Friday, January 17, 2014 12:34 PM, [hidden email] wrote
>> Is this subject still valid? And wouldn't it be great to have one (or some)
>> of the subjects on the (short-term) roadmap?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Pierre Smits
>>
>> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
>> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
>> Based Manufacturing, Professional
>> Services and Retail & Trade
>> http://www.orrtiz.com

[Pierre Smits]

Indeed, doing cleanups in the data model is a major feat requiring
awareness, focus and coordination.
But not putting these improvement issues on the docket (roadmap) will
ensure that the suggestions (discussion items) done in this thread will be
overwhelmed by other threads and keep recurring as discussion topics not
addressed.
But also the perception of (potential) organisations, that investing in
(the implementation of) OFBiz is a valid option, will wither and die.

After incorporating these improvement issues in the roadmap, associated
JIRA issues can be created to discuss impact in detail, increase awareness
of impact and dependencies, and integration can be planned. In stead of
muddling along on the path where we are now.

If the community would embark on the endeavour regarding the cleanup the
data model, services and ui aspects, it would warrant a new branch of trunk
leading to new version of OFBiz.

I believe that this could also recharge the community to interact more and
even grow. Otherwise this project will not live long enough to celebrate a
second decade.



Pierre Smits

*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com


On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 11:04 AM, David E. Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> Doing significant data model cleanups and changes is a LOT of work with a
> large code base and user community. All code that uses the data structure
> needs to be changes, and accommodations are needed for deprecating the old
> entity or fields and migrating data to the new ones. So yes, to the point
> Jacques made, it's not likely short-term and without significant investment
> and coordination with others in the community it is not really likely
> long-term either.
>
> For years I built up a list of changes that would be nice to do in OFBiz
> itself, but so many are not really feasible. There may still be some of
> them worth doing, so for some ideas to consider here are my change notes
> for the Mantle data model:
>
> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/Planning.txt
>
> At this point there are lots of generic services and end-to-end automated
> tests that use many of these changes to the data structures so they are
> pretty well vetted and validated and not just theoretical like when this
> thread started a couple years ago. One of the benefits to many of these
> changes is that not only is the data model smaller and cleaner, but it
> makes it possible to simplify or eliminate large amounts of logic layer
> code.
>
> For OFBiz, along the lines of the reasons mentioned above, that would
> involve quite a few code changes but maybe the best way to look at it is
> that this is the main reason to do the data model changes (ie simplifying
> and eliminating code) as opposed to just changing the data model for the
> sake of the data model itself.
>
> -David
>
>
>
> On Jan 17, 2014, at 4:57 AM, Jacques Le Roux <[hidden email]>
> wrote:
>
> > I think it's still alive, but I bet it will not be short-term...
> >
> > Jacques
> >
> > On Friday, January 17, 2014 12:34 PM, [hidden email] wrote
> >> Is this subject still valid? And wouldn't it be great to have one (or
> some)
> >> of the subjects on the (short-term) roadmap?
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Pierre Smits
> >>
> >> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
> >> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
> >> Based Manufacturing, Professional
> >> Services and Retail & Trade
> >> http://www.orrtiz.com
>
>

[Jacques Le Roux]

On Saturday, January 18, 2014 5:34 PM, [hidden email] wrote
> Indeed, doing cleanups in the data model is a major feat requiring
> awareness, focus and coordination.
> But not putting these improvement issues on the docket (roadmap) will
> ensure that the suggestions (discussion items) done in this thread will be
> overwhelmed by other threads and keep recurring as discussion topics not
> addressed.
> But also the perception of (potential) organisations, that investing in
> (the implementation of) OFBiz is a valid option, will wither and die.

I tend to agree
 
> After incorporating these improvement issues in the roadmap, associated
> JIRA issues can be created to discuss impact in detail, increase awareness
> of impact and dependencies, and integration can be planned. In stead of
> muddling along on the path where we are now.

We could discuss it again, but IIRW the path is:
1) Discuss ideas/concepts, define/refine requirements/data-models on dev ML (simply because it's faster and easier for most, if not all of us, at the ASF Jira and Confluence can be slow...)
2) Write them in Confluence
3) Open corresponding Jira issues (grouping them can help, how to group depends but sub-tasks sounds easier to me)

> If the community would embark on the endeavour regarding the cleanup the
> data model, services and ui aspects, it would warrant a new branch of trunk
> leading to new version of OFBiz.

Premature, we should before estimate who wants to do what, the bottleneck as always been the manpower.
I noted we should prune https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/New+Features+Roadmap+-+Living+Document
Future is still not a priority to me (hopefully soon). I'm still in cleaning and securing stuff.
 
> I believe that this could also recharge the community to interact more and
> even grow. Otherwise this project will not live long enough to celebrate a
> second decade.

It would be a pity.
Things like node.js and AKKA are quickly gaining interest (for good reasons).
Still all those lack what OFBiz framework has around it (even is not perfect).

Jacques

>
>
> Pierre Smits
>
> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
> Based Manufacturing, Professional
> Services and Retail & Trade
> http://www.orrtiz.com
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 11:04 AM, David E. Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Doing significant data model cleanups and changes is a LOT of work with a
>> large code base and user community. All code that uses the data structure
>> needs to be changes, and accommodations are needed for deprecating the old
>> entity or fields and migrating data to the new ones. So yes, to the point
>> Jacques made, it's not likely short-term and without significant investment
>> and coordination with others in the community it is not really likely
>> long-term either.
>>
>> For years I built up a list of changes that would be nice to do in OFBiz
>> itself, but so many are not really feasible. There may still be some of
>> them worth doing, so for some ideas to consider here are my change notes
>> for the Mantle data model:
>>
>> https://github.com/jonesde/mantle/blob/master/mantle-udm/Planning.txt
>>
>> At this point there are lots of generic services and end-to-end automated
>> tests that use many of these changes to the data structures so they are
>> pretty well vetted and validated and not just theoretical like when this
>> thread started a couple years ago. One of the benefits to many of these
>> changes is that not only is the data model smaller and cleaner, but it
>> makes it possible to simplify or eliminate large amounts of logic layer
>> code.
>>
>> For OFBiz, along the lines of the reasons mentioned above, that would
>> involve quite a few code changes but maybe the best way to look at it is
>> that this is the main reason to do the data model changes (ie simplifying
>> and eliminating code) as opposed to just changing the data model for the
>> sake of the data model itself.
>>
>> -David
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jan 17, 2014, at 4:57 AM, Jacques Le Roux <[hidden email]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I think it's still alive, but I bet it will not be short-term...
>>>
>>> Jacques
>>>
>>> On Friday, January 17, 2014 12:34 PM, [hidden email] wrote
>>>> Is this subject still valid? And wouldn't it be great to have one (or some)
>>>> of the subjects on the (short-term) roadmap?
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Pierre Smits
>>>>
>>>> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
>>>> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
>>>> Based Manufacturing, Professional
>>>> Services and Retail & Trade
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