Moving third party shipping integrations from applications to plugins

[Mridul Pathak]

Hi,

Recently, discussion around moving third party integrations has been initiated 
again on dev mailing list thread 
<https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf7967b26b89d753388ccee364643f502c72e781da54fe6d5aca1577f@%3Cdev.ofbiz.apache.org%3E>
 and was also discussed in past on dev mailing list thread 
<https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/e2a2b5598fb4314062beca47e0522434852d0189e888e36852b5a6cd@%3Cdev.ofbiz.apache.org%3E>.
 When reviewing third party shipping integration in this context, I noticed 
that some of the shipping integration services (example, upsShipConfirm, 
fedexShipRequest, etc.) are hard coded at places in product and order 
components and in shipment workflow in facility application. There could be 
some other such occurrences as well. Ideally these third party services needs 
to be configurations and to be able to move these shipping integrations out of 
applications to plugins some refactoring is needed so as to not loose any 
existing support in OFBIz applications.

We do have ProductStoreShipmentMeth entity for configurations but it is more 
specific to detailed shipment method level configurations rather than carrier 
level configurations. We also have carrier level shipping gateway configuration 
entities like ShipmentGatewayUPS, etc. But again these are more specific to 
store connectivity configurations. I feel that we need more like a 
ProductStorePaymentSettings entity to configure various possible integration 
services (like rate service, request label service, address verification 
service, etc.) offered by these third party logistic services.

I propose to introduce a new entity “ProductStoreShipmentSettings” to configure 
available shipping gateway services for shipping carriers at product store 
level. To begin with the entity could have following fields,
1. productStoreId (pk)
2. carrierPartyId (pk)
3. shipmentServiceEnumId (pk)
4. shipmentService
5. shipmentGatewayConfigId (Ideally this field should become party of this new 
entity, though it is currently supported in ProductStoreShipmentMeth entity)

The above change would enable us to refactor these hardcoded reference to make 
them configurable and be able to move these integrations to plugins without 
loosing any available support in applications.

Looking forward to suggestions and feedback.

Thanks.
Mridul Pathak