From: "David E Jones" <d...@me.com>
If any single entity were to be used for types instead of one per type, why not
Enumeration? And yes, that is what I did with the
Mantle data model.
When I first played with OFBiz that's what I wondered about, why not all in
Enumeration? Maybe simplistic, there are always pro and
cons, 2 sides of a coins, etc. (I don't know for you guys, but I often find
myself in this situation)
The simpler the better, if you (application developer) have less choices to do you can
focus on your "real" problems (your clients's
problems). That's what I still appreciate in OFBiz, even if it's not the case
for types indeed. Changing them now seems a bit too
complicated, I agree.
Jacques
Still, I agree with Jacopo... It is not worth the change repercussions for
OFBiz. What you described is a problem with lack of
research and/or experience, and I don't think what you described would be any
more helpful.
-David
On Oct 6, 2012, at 10:19, Adrian Crum <adrian.c...@sandglass-software.com>
wrote:
So your opinion has changed...
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/ofbiz-dev/201103.mbox/%3c82330f5c-3938-487e-98ae-ffee0c876...@hotwaxmedia.com%3E
-Adrian
On 10/5/2012 10:23 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
HelloAdrian,
in my opinion it would be better to leave the data model as is, but improve the
descriptions of the types (and documentation, in
the form of comments to xml data) and also enhnce our utils to deal with types
(the Product already has something in place).
Regards,
Jacopo
On Oct 1, 2012, at 8:14 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I mentioned this once before as part of another discussion, but I'm creating a
new discussion so it can receive the attention
it deserves.
The Data Model Resource Book describes entity subtypes. OFBiz implements entity
subtypes by adding a field to the supertype
that points to a *Type entity that contains valid subtypes.
The problem is users (and some developers) do not understand that pattern, and
they add invalid subtypes to the *Type entity.
That can cause things to break. As an example, I have a client who created
additional ProductTypes (that actually represented
product categories) and used those added ProductTypes for their products. Then
they were puzzled why their order fulfillment
process stopped working.
I think what we need is an EntitySubtype entity to store the subtype data.
Instead of multiple *Type entities, we would have a
single EntitySubtype entity, and the supertypes will point to it. The supertype
field could be called something like
entitySubtypeId. The EntitySubtype entity will be clearly documented as to its
purpose and proper use.
EntitySubtype
-------------
entityName*
entitySubtypeId*
description
What do you think?
-Adrian
