Hi,
Yesterday, I created infrastructure to customize and run Balance sheet,
P&L, trial balance and "generic list" reports (in their downloadable
versions) on a per-company basis. To support this use-case, they will need
to be uploaded to the database, just like the invoice, order and other
templates.
For our code base, it's an either/or situation that we support the
in-database templates (or remain with the ones on-disk). Personally, I see
benefits in moving to the in-database templates, mostly because they then
become customizable by end users with sufficient rights, not just system
admins.
Now, I'm looking for a suitable way to make the switch for everybody who
already has a pre-1.8 system running when we release this functionality
with 1.8. I see several options to get templates into their databases:
1. Create an SQL database upgrade script with the templates embedded
This has the benefit that the templates will be there after the database
is upgraded. However, when the templates change over time, the script can't
be updated to include the updated templates, because that's the way our SQL
schema change management works.
2. Do nothing, but fail with an error about the import needing to happen
when the templates are missing upon output generation
This is probably the easiest way to go by, but the error might end up
with users who won't be able to address the issue themselves.
3. Create new infrastructure to test "company configuration sanity" which
can be run from setup.pl at the end of the migration
This solution is a lot of additional work, but can be used to indicate
configuration and database health issues to admins after upgrades. One such
issue would be that the templates are missing. This functionality can be
used independently from upgrades as well and would address the issue that
we have wanted to land database integrity/sanity checks (but didn't have
anywhere to do so).
Comments? Other ideas?
Regards,
--
Bye,
Erik.
http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.