John -
a good ways back we ran into this issue - on a much older version of the
OfBiz codebase. I found the following items to be helpful:
1> It's handy to have an entity type to store "External Systems".
Where you find yourself integrating with one external system, you often
find yourself integrating with more than just one.
2> On the same note - it's helpful to be able to store multiple
external Ids per entity that you might be synchronizing with external
systems.
3> Combining 1 & 2 you'll find that querying using an External Id is
most useful when you can supply with which system the external id is in
respect to.
Additionally - you may find that you need to reference or synchronize
more than just party information - contact mechs, etc.
Ultimately this resulted in us having an "admin" screen to configure the
names and ids of external system and data feeds: accounting,
track-and-trace, etc. Under the party profile we added a screen which
dynamically listed the external systems defined - and allowed the user
to add one or more external ids to each of the external system blocks.
I only mention the "one or more" as I've found that some external
systems have extremely "dirty" data - duplicate records like: Foo
Incorporated, Foo Inc., Foo - all being the "same" record, created by
different users over time. It can be handy to have a mechanism to
"rejoin" the records when they hit OfBiz.
Just some thoughts from previous integrating work.
- Porter Woodward
John Martin wrote:
> I've gone ahead and have implemented the ability to lookup a Party by
> an External Id. The feature has been created in JIRA:
>
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-382.
>
> I wanted to get peoples opinion weather or not to display the
> "External Id" prompt in the party lookup form all the time or if this
> should only appear if some configuration setting is enabled for users
> of ofBiz that are using the External Id?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>
Locked
