David E Jones wrote:
On Dec 13, 2007, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Marco's recent work in Jira brought this issue to my attention:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-636.
I would like to start working on that feature. Since that issue was
created, comments have been made in other discussions on the mailing
list that may have an impact on the implementation.
The idea is to have a system configuration screen. David mentioned
recently in an unrelated topic that having a UI for system-level
configuration would be undesirable:
"If you have a config UI it makes it even more difficult to manage
because if someone changes something in the UI and someone else
writing code makes a corresponding configuration in the file system,
when the data is reloaded you might end up with a change loss
problem... and that's only one scenario."
At the same time, we do get requests for a configuration UI.
So I'd like to work on this, but there is already a disagreement over
whether it should be done.
Any ideas on how I should proceed? Does anyone see a need for such a
feature?
You have taken my comments out of context. Some things should be
configurable through the UI, others should not. My point is that things
which are creating along with code or that are managed as part of a
coordinated deployment (like server settings and such that vary in
different deployment environments, like dev, test, qa, staging,
production, etc, including app server and database and such settings)
should NOT be in a UI, partly for the reasons in my comment above.
Business level things most certainly SHOULD be configurable in the UI
and make sense to put in the database. That was the other part of what
I wrote that isn't quoted above, including examples of what constitutes
business versus system level settings. Above are some things about
system level settings, and a strong example of business level settings
is the payment.properties file, and things in other places like
shipping configuration and such.
It's not a question of if, and I never said it was, in fact I tried to
make it very clear that it's a question of what and where.
-David
I'm sorry you feel you were misquoted. I thought I made it clear (notice my qualifiers "system
configuration" and "system-level") that the configuration screen being proposed was for the very
things you said should not be configured through the UI. Business level configuration is another
subject - and many of those screens already exist.
My thinking is more along the lines of someone downloading and installing a binary release version -
who might not be sophisticated enough to dig through multiple *.properties and *.xml files to
configure the installation. A configuration UI would be helpful in that scenario. (Not everyone
wants to download and install Eclipse just to get OFBiz set up. ;-) )
I agree with your view - having two paths to file modification can lead to problems. The question
is, how can we maintain configuration file integrity and still make it easier for a newcomer to
configure their system? And, in a small shop/single administrator setting, is it even an issue?
-Adrian
