I'm new here so this may be the best forum for the subject. Apologies in advance. One of the more annoying aspects of ERP/MRP applications is that they often have user-visible and user-managed data as the object's unique identifier. This would be in e.g. Product lists where the product name (or item code, if you like) is used as the internal unique key.
But if they are used as reference keys in other tables, then changing the name of a product becomes "impossible" as the cascade of references cannot often be changed; for e.g. audit purposes where an audit trail can never be altered. I've run across the situation a significant number of times, supporting proprietary MRP/ERP packages over the past 20 years. It's not common, but it does happen. The main requirement to support e.g. renaming a product without causing massive, cascading data updates is to use a key that's never visible to the user interface. Well, until they dig down to the SQL level and need to do joins, etc. There are other objects that may change what the user would like to call them in the course of time. Even employees change their names; as do contacts. And how does one deal neatly with (sometimes frequent) name changes of business partners? Even towns and countries change their names. But we'd still like to be able to do an analysis on the same place/business/person/etc without trying to figure out an old name. There would have to be data structure and code changes in OpenERP; so perhaps this is something to look atfor version 6.x -------------------- m2f -------------------- -- http://www.openobject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=49516#49516 -------------------- m2f -------------------- _______________________________________________ Tinyerp-users mailing list http://tiny.be/mailman2/listinfo/tinyerp-users
