openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Alan Lord <alanslists@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

(Originally sent to the OpenERP Partner Mailing list but rejected as 
being Off Topic)

I'd like to discuss the topic of the removal of the 
{sale,account}_layout modules in the next version of OpenERP.

I am starting to think about, and write, a migration plan for one of our 
customers who is currently on 6.0.4.

Aside from various minor issues the one critical feature that will stop 
a migration is the lack of the *_layout module feature set.

In their business they generate some very long quotes with lots of line 
items. They often repeat line items and use sale_layout to add notes and 
titles to sections of the quote to indicate where this block of items 
are to go (they design and fit Lighting Systems into very large retail 
supermarkets).

Obviously, the order in which items are shown on the quote is also critical.

I have been playing with trunk for a while just getting a feel for it. A 
few weeks ago you could re-order line items on a quote, but that was 
about it; no notes, titles, sub-totals etc.

On twitter[1] Olivier indicated that some of the features of *_layout 
will be incorporated as standard into 7.

A couple of days ago I updated our trunk system and even the ability to 
re-order line items seems to have disappeared.

For our customer(s), it actually gets a bit worse as they really want to 
have the *_layout functionality work across the entire workflow so that 
the information which is carefully built into the original Quotation, 
Notes, order of items, sub-totals, headings etc. gets transferred to the 
Delivery Order and ultimately to an Invoice too.

The Delivery Order is actually a very important for the fitters in the 
retail stores - and the quote/sale order often needs to be changed after 
order confirmation, so they use the Delivery Order quite frequently to 
update quantities and add/remove products but currently they do not have 
the _layout features which makes it harder.

So finally to my question :-)

As this is a critical piece of functionality I would like to know if 
there is a plan within OpenERP for the _layout replacement, and if so 
what specific features will be available in 7 and what will be removed? 
We need this fairly soon so we can start to plan with our customer and 
determine what features we will need to write ourselves...

[1] https://twitter.com/odony/status/233232207332921344

Thanks

Alan

PS: This whole thing has made me wonder... Why is the whole line-item 
code different between the various objects anyway? Would it not make 
more sense to have a single chunk of code (a line_item module) that 
deals with line sequencing, notes and other features etc. and make it 
the *same* across the whole system?


--
Alan Lord
Libertus Solutions

Web: http://www.libertus.co.uk