openerp-india team mailing list archive

[Goran Kliska <gkliska@xxxxxxxxx>]

+1 for comment #21
"One address is nothing more than one address. Many2many with all other entities. One same address can be related to any other entity, so including address on partner, not having address separate entity is itself one bad basic db error..."

Partners and products are cornerstones of any business program. 
While trying to implement universal model described here 
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5014/ 
programs usually becomes  too complex to use.

Hierarchy in Partner entity is good for describing complex organizations. Nothing more.
Flag 'is_company'  can be good enough to distinguish Persons and Organizations.
There is a need for Address as a separate entity and  many2many relations.
Let it be generic address with a type and usage that can be easily extended. 

Other m2m relations Partners2Partners with relation types can then be implemented as 
series of addons adding complexity as nedded.

Moving Contacts form partner_address is improvement in 7.0., 
but "not having address separate entity " is not.

Goran Kliska

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1151947

Title:
  Link several addresses on individual partners (not companies)

Status in OpenERP Server:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Hello,

  Thanks to the Fabien's Q&A on help.openerp.com regarding how to have
  several addresses on partners, I think the situation is clear enough and well
  explained for companies [0].

  However, I still can't find a good way to link several addresses on
  individual customers, not companies, in a B2C context. I posted a
  question and got no response [1].

  Here is a use case, I'll use it in my hypothesis below.

  Mr Foo lives at Bar Street 1.
  He works at Baz Avenue 150 and usually he wants to receive goods at
  work.

  I see 4 hypothesis for that in OpenERP 7:

  1. I create 2 distinct partners:

  * Mr Leo Foo at Bar Street 1
  * Mr Leo Foo at Baz Avenue 150

  They haven't any links between them.

  Problems:

  * From a usability point of view, this would be a mess, especially if I have
    homonyms. I would never be sure what is the main address of Mr Foo and
    would have difficulties to find his good addresses (even if I set Baz
    Avenue 150 as 'delivery' address, I would also the 'delivery'
    addresses of  his homonym Mr Foo in the searches).
  * I would have wrong accounting entries, sometimes on Mr Foo at Bar
    Street, sometimes on Mr Foo at Baz Avenue

  Conclusion:
  It seems to me that this solution is not applicable due to accounting
  issues.

  2. I put the main address of Mr Foo as `is_company`:

  * Mr Leo Foo at Bar Street 1 is the main record, considered as
    `is_company`.
  * Mr Leo Foo at Baz Avenue 150 is a contact of type 'delivery' linked
    to the Mr Foo company record.

  We would not have accounting issues, because this is already handled for
  companies. The searches and usability would be improved over solution 1.

  Problems:

  * Mr Foo is not a company!
  * This would be totally misleading
  * If any existing or future addons use the field `is_company` to apply
    some logic which should only be applied for companies, we would be
    bloody damned with individuals considered as companies

  Conclusion:
  It seems to me that this would be a good solution, but with a renaming
  of the field `is_company` to something more general (and eventually keep
  a field `is_company` to only keep this information). => too late for v7?

  3. This use case is not supported by OpenERP 7 and has to be coded in a
  community addon.

  Problems:

  * We have to be very sure that this problem will be handled
    in only one way. If a part of the community manages it in one way and an
    other part in another way, we'll start to see incompatibility between
    addons (and OpenERP risks issues for migrations too).

  Conclusion:
  It would be very surprising because this use case is very basic for B2C.
  I think that a so 'low level' part of the datamodel should be defined by
  OpenERP to avoid to compromise higher level addons. A change on theses
  base models can have an impact on all the other addons (see
  base_contact).  But let's admit this hypothesis is the good one.

  I'm alright to create a community addon to handle this use case (by the
  way, this is a prerequisite to synchronize openerp with magento). But I
  expect a strong guidance from OpenERP, I need to know how this link
  should be done (add an `is_individual` field like the `is_company`
  field? Just add the `parent_id` field accessible everytime?) to ensure
  that the community addon's solution won't go against the current with
  OpenERP devs.

  4. I just missed the way to do that

  Conclusion:
  The usability on this point should be improved because no one has ever
  answered to my question :-)

  
  What is the solution advocated by OpenERP and why?
  Thanks

  
  Guewen

  
  [0] http://help.openerp.com/question/4341/on-v61-one-partner-could-have-several-addresses-invoicing-delivery-is-this-still-possible-in-v7/
  [1] http://help.openerp.com/question/135/how-do-i-attach-different-addresses-on-a-individual-customer/

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