Parties/customers -- maybe no answer required

[Craig Parker <cr...@fossfolks.com>]

If a computer repair business were using OFBiz, and one of their 
customers had several locations, how would OFBiz keep track of things 
like each location's public IP address, devices on each of those 
locations' LANs, with notes about each device (LAN address, username and 
pass in the case of a router, firewall, or server) and people to contact 
at each location.

Why my subject says maybe no answer required is that I'm about to dig 
into what we've got for docs in an official capacity, and I may find it 
down the road anyway. If you know this is doable, just let me know and 
I'll be paying special attention for it as while I'm working on updating 
docs.

And I'm also asking because I've got my own PHP app almost written that 
does all this, but if I'm going to run a business with OFBiz, I'd rather 
just let it do all the keeping track of stuff like this, rather than 
bouncing around in different applications. I may still write a PHP 
script that pulls from the OFBiz db and displays how I'd like, but that 
depends on how OFBiz does it.

Re: Parties/customers -- maybe no answer required

[Paul Mandeltort <pa...@marcospec.com>]

> On May 31, 2017, at 12:16 PM, Craig Parker <cr...@fossfolks.com> wrote:
> 
> If a computer repair business were using OFBiz, and one of their customers had several locations, how would OFBiz keep track of things like each location's public IP address, devices on each of those locations' LANs, with notes about each device (LAN address, username and pass in the case of a router, firewall, or server) and people to contact at each location.

I’d do:

Each Customer (Top level)- Party Group
Customer Location - Party, linked to Parent Party via related accounts 
Location contacts - each one goes in a Party/Person linked to the location Party

Devices - Asset entity, tied to the appropriate Party (location), IP addresses and other stuff add as Asset Identifications like serial numbers.  
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Asset+Maintenance+Setup <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Asset+Maintenance+Setup>

Nice part about the Asset model is you can also tie it to Product IDs. So you could have say all of your Cisco Model #12345 routers linked appropriately.  It also has some nice services for scheduling tasks by asset groups. 

You should be able to squeeze that all into the existing data model which will make your maintenance much easier. General rule I try to follow is avoid changing the native data model at all costs, 9 times out of 10 it’s the business process that needs tweaking, not the data model. :-) 
 
> Why my subject says maybe no answer required is that I'm about to dig into what we've got for docs in an official capacity, and I may find it down the road anyway. If you know this is doable, just let me know and I'll be paying special attention for it as while I'm working on updating docs.
> 
> And I'm also asking because I've got my own PHP app almost written that does all this, but if I'm going to run a business with OFBiz, I'd rather just let it do all the keeping track of stuff like this, rather than bouncing around in different applications. I may still write a PHP script that pulls from the OFBiz db and displays how I'd like, but that depends on how OFBiz does it.

From a maintenance perspective, it’s wise to avoid mixing PHP and Java worlds if you’re writing new code, will make your long term maintenance and devops a giant headache, having to maintain two software stacks.  Picking up Freemarker is pretty trivial, or if you are using something newer on the gui side just expose what you need via a ofbiz service. 

—P