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
