Implementation of Party lookup by External Id

[John Martin <pb...@gmail.com>]

I've gone ahead and have implemented the ability to lookup a Party by
an External Id.  The feature has been created in JIRA:
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-382.

I wanted to get peoples opinion weather or not to display the
"External Id" prompt in the party lookup form all the time or if this
should only appear if some configuration setting is enabled for users
of ofBiz that are using the External Id?

Thanks,

John

Re: Implementation of Party lookup by External Id

[Porter Woodward <pw...@practicable.net>]

John -

unfortunately it's not already part of OfBiz - and we built it a while 
ago against a much older revision of OfBiz, either a late 1.x or early 
2.x version.  I can dig around and see if I can find the entity 
definitions - and there may be some code for various services;  however, 
any user interface code would likely be useless in the current versions 
of OfBiz.

- Porter

John Martin wrote:
> Hi Porter,
>
> Yes, I do agree that making the party a one-many relationship to
> multiple external systems makes sense.  Am I to understand that this
> functionality is already built into ofBiz or is that code that you
> have developed proprietary?  If it is already part of the system, can
> you point me to where I can see it?
>
> -John
>

Re: Implementation of Party lookup by External Id

[John Martin <pb...@gmail.com>]

Hi Porter,

Yes, I do agree that making the party a one-many relationship to
multiple external systems makes sense.  Am I to understand that this
functionality is already built into ofBiz or is that code that you
have developed proprietary?  If it is already part of the system, can
you point me to where I can see it?

-John

Re: Implementation of Party lookup by External Id

[Porter Woodward <pw...@practicable.net>]

John -

a good ways back we ran into this issue - on a much older version of the 
OfBiz codebase.  I found the following items to be helpful:

1>  It's handy to have an entity type to store "External Systems".  
Where you find yourself integrating with one external system, you often 
find yourself integrating with more than just one.

2>  On the same note - it's helpful to be able to store multiple 
external Ids per entity that you might be synchronizing with external 
systems.

3>  Combining 1 & 2 you'll find that querying using an External Id is 
most useful when you can supply with which system the external id is in 
respect to.

Additionally - you may find that you need to reference or synchronize 
more than just party information - contact mechs, etc.

Ultimately this resulted in us having an "admin" screen to configure the 
names and ids of external system and data feeds:  accounting, 
track-and-trace, etc.  Under the party profile we added a screen which 
dynamically listed the external systems defined - and allowed the user 
to add one or more external ids to each of the external system blocks.  
I only mention the "one or more" as I've found that some external 
systems have extremely "dirty" data - duplicate records like:  Foo 
Incorporated, Foo Inc.,  Foo - all being the "same" record, created by 
different users over time.  It can be handy to have a mechanism to 
"rejoin" the records when they hit OfBiz.

Just some thoughts from previous integrating work.

- Porter Woodward

John Martin wrote:
> I've gone ahead and have implemented the ability to lookup a Party by
> an External Id.  The feature has been created in JIRA:
> http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-382.
>
> I wanted to get peoples opinion weather or not to display the
> "External Id" prompt in the party lookup form all the time or if this
> should only appear if some configuration setting is enabled for users
> of ofBiz that are using the External Id?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>