On Apr 30, 2010, at 6:06 PM, Scott Gray wrote:
On 1/05/2010, at 3:52 AM, Adam Heath wrote:
Scott Gray wrote:
I think Agreements are more like the terms of a relationship and
can change over the course of that relationship.
I would tend to think of an account number as being more like
relationship meta data that exists so long as the relationship
exists and for that reason I would either add a generic field to
PartyRelationship or otherwise add a new entity
SupplierRelationship and one-to-one it with PartyRelationship.
I like the latter, SupplierRelationship, as there could be an
unbounded set of SupplierIdentificationType and
SupplierIdentificationPurpose fields.
That wasn't what I was suggesting, I was describing
SupplierRelationship as being an extension to PartyRelationship in
the same way that Person or PartyGroup extends Party.
Yes I think this is the solution that Adrian has original suggested a
couple of years back and is the same solution I had thought about
implementing when I started this thread. I think the difficulty here
comes in the fact that the data model book has sub-classes for both
PartyRelationship and Agreement for this purpose (Supplier
Relationship and Purchase Agreement respectively from page 43 and 149
of The Data Model Resource Book volume 1). There are also sub-classes
for both for "Employeement" named "Employment" and "Employment
Agreement".
The book suggests that Agreement is involved in a single
PartyRelationship (but the relationship may be associated with a
collection of Agreements). Ofbiz does not model this association, but
I think it probably should. A scan of the forum for anything on this
topic did not produce any results. Again the book suggests the
PartyRelationship is an informal relationship where the agreement is
created "when a formal agreement is established between these parties
and a contract is drawn stipulating certain terms of this
agreement ...".
For a supplier I think it is desirable to have an informal
PartyRelationship between the Internal Organization and the Party that
will be supplying products. We may also (optionally) have a formal
agreement that dictates pricing and other terms (like net 30, etc).
However, the life of this section agreement may be much shorter than
the life of the relationship to the supplier. And it is very likely
that the supplier supplied "customerNumber" or "accountNumber" would
live across many agreements.
As a result, I would like to get started on this new entity
"SupplierRel" and will provide a patch soon.
