Joe,I agree with you 100%. When I think of tracking numbers I think of tracking shipments, when I think of tracking codes I think of tracking URLs and referrers, usually in some sort of marketing campaign.
I think what you propose is to change this to be consistent. Consistency is always a good thing, and lack of consistency leads to confusion and incorrect implementations.
I agree with this change. Keep in mind though, when changing this field, it will require and upgrade path. Keeping the old field and providing a way to migrate the old data to the new field.
Just my two cents. Andrew On Oct 28, 2008, at 2:25 AM, Joe Eckard wrote:
On Oct 27, 2008, at 4:08 PM, David E Jones wrote:To me this doesn't seem like enough of a reason to change the field name.Did you run into some big confusion between the terms "tracking code" and "tracking number"? In a way I don't like tracking number because most tracking "numbers" aren't really numbers, they include alpha letters and sometimes punctuation too.No, nothing like that - I just wasn't sure why we refer to this identifier as "trackingIdNumber" in the ShipmentRouteSegment entity, "trackingNumber" in the OrderItemShipGroup entity, and "trackingCode" in the ShipmentPackageRouteSeg entity. I think that all three are describing the same thing.Also, I agree that "tracking ID" would have been a better choice for everyone to somehow agree on, however... see belowI must admit though that I've never run into anything like this sort of confusion or any sort of related conflict in terms. Is there something online somewhere that my be helpful for me, and others similarly uniformed (if there are any)?In all of the documentation / advertising / help sections / FAQs / confirmation emails, etc. I have read, this identifier is called a tracking number. If you google "tracking number", the first results are pages from the four main carriers that all refer to this identifier as a tracking number. If you look at the existing code in OFBiz, it is already referred to as a tracking number in most places, but mapped back to trackingCode for the package route segment. The Fedex and UPS APIs accept / return this identifier explicitly as TrackingNumber.Actually, it feels a little bizarre even stopping to write this - maybe because the term is just ingrained in my vocabulary, and I think I may be misreading some sarcasm?In any case, the reason I brought this up is that I am working on some code dealing with shipments, packages and tracking numbers and it seemed like a clear-cut, genuine naming inconsistency that should be corrected before any more code was written to follow it.-David On Oct 26, 2008, at 9:38 AM, Joe Eckard wrote:ShipmentPackageRouteSeg has a field called trackingCode which should really be trackingNumber (see: OrderItemShipGroup field "trackingNumber" & standard industry terminology). The field name "trackingCode" is used in the marketing entities and code to describe something completely different.I created a patch for this, and it touches quite a few files - are there any objections to this change?-Joe
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