I am new to ofbiz ERP and trying to understand how it works. I've just read Party and Accounting chapters from Data Model Resource Book Vol 1. After a quick glance on the modules (Party and Accounting) of ofbiz, following is my first impression I would like to share with you and request you to correct if I am assuming anything wrong:
- The data model presented in Data Model Resource book captures the static model of the system and doesn't focus on the business rules that validate, generate, drive or process that data. - ofbiz might be a beautiful implementation of data models presented in the book, however it is merely a collection of ugly screens that ignores significant business rules and just provide data entry mechanism for the tables that implement the models mentioned in the book. - For example in Party module, a Person, who already has a role Employee, can have additional roles of Organization Unit, Internal Organization and in fact any other role (which of course doesn't make any sense). - According to the Data Model Resource book, Internal Accounting Transactions are not associated with any party and when doing External Transactions we usually need to refer party(ies). However, I was able to do a GL transaction for asset depreciation and also referred Party and in fact any other detail. Numerous examples like above can be easily given. Is it really like this that ofbiz is only a mechanism to quickly populate the tables that implement the models presented in that book and may be in some other book(s)? Regards Muhammad Aamir
