Open to all Openbravo Community members, in this webinar you will learn main concepts, achievements  in 2009 and the plan going forward for 2010 related to Openbravo Modularity and Ecosystem. And you will have the opportunity to participate in an open discussion  about a couple of ideas that Openbravo team wants to promote in order to improve collaboration.

Take a look at this post for more details about the webinar.

Many ERP applications support only one method or the other. If they do support both methods then it tends to be a global parameter that sets the behaviour for the system as a whole. Openbravo supports both types of reversal and gives users granular control over how and when they use each reversal type.

In Openbravo, users can control transaction reversal behaviour at a schema level using the “Allow negative” parameter. This parameter controls the default reversal behaviour of all reversing transactions. If the parameter is left blank then the default behaviour is "contra" reversal, and if it is "ticked" then "storno" is used as a default.

Additionally, this behaviour can be controlled at a document level.
For a specific Accounting Schema go to Account Schema Tables.
In this example we want to control the way that Invoices are reversed, so we select the "Invoice" document type.

Within the Invoice document type we select the "Documents" tab....

...where we can then choose the Document Category for which we want to control the reversal behaviour (by setting the "Allow negative" parameter).

In our example we want to set the behaviour of the AP Invoice.

If we view the AP Credit Memo transaction we see the following:

Two new document types, the "AP Storno Credit Memo" and the "AR Storno Credit Memo", can then be added. When creating them we ensure that the "Allow negative" parameter is selected during configuration. This will means that the user will then be able to do a contra reversal by using a "credit memo" and a storno using the "storno credit memo".

The Payment Monitor provides users with a quick, single click, view of the latest payment information related to an invoice. If payment has been received in full then the status is now clearly shown as "Payment Complete". If payment is still pending, then by clicking on the new Payment Monitor button on the invoice header, the payment monitor information displays the number of days until the due date of the next payment and the amount that needs to be paid on that date. The user can also see how much has been paid, how much is pending and the last time the payment status was calculated. This feature is particularly useful if an invoice has multiple due dates as the Payment Monitor tracks the invoice payment status for each payment. The payment status can be updated automatically by a background process that automatically scans new invoices or manually (by clicking on the "Update Payment Monitor" button.

One of the great thing about this feature is that all of this information is available as filter criteria and exposed in the grid view. This makes the Payment Monitor a very handy and agile tool that allows users to manage collections very easily and could in many ways replace the Payments Report.

This is the first one of a series of posts about development tips that I use in a daily basis. I think that you can benefit from them, and speed up your daily work. There are some one-line commands that you can use to execute several things in one shot. Those is targeting GNU/Linux users.

Speeding up Firefox

I have found a few tips that can improve its performance.

Use different profiles

Add-ons could decrease the performance of your browser. One example of decreasing performance add-on is Firebug. It’s just a great tool to debug JavaScript, CSS, HTML, monitor requests, etc, but it has a known issue:

“… If you have Firebug installed you are probably not getting fast Javascript. Firebug doesn’t have to be active on your current page …”

That’s why is a best practice to use Firebug in a different profile.

I have a profile named “debug” where the only add-on installed is Firebug and made a simple bash script ffbug to open Firefox with that profile:

#!/bin/bash
firefox -no-remote -P "debug" &

The -no-remote parameter allows you open a new instance of Firefox and not just a new window linked to the current running one. The -P is to define which profile you want to use.

VACUUM the SQLite databases

You can improve the performance of Firefox by vacuum your bookmarks, history, etc. databases.
Close all your running Firefox instances and execute:

~ $ for i in $(find -name '*.sqlite'); do sqlite3 $i VACUUM; done;

Useful one-line commands

Updating the source code of the modules your working on

In some cases you work with several modules at the same time, and you want to get all the changes made by your colleagues. You can update your local repositories by executing this line inside your modules folder:

for i in $(ls -1); do cd $i; hg pull -u; cd ..; done;

Example of the output of this is:

~/src/openbravo/working/pi-reference/modules $ for i in $(ls -1); do cd $i; hg pull -u; cd ..; done;
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.base.seam
searching for changes
no changes found
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.client.freemarker/
searching for changes
no changes found
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.client.kernel/
searching for changes
no changes found
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.service.datasource
searching for changes
no changes found
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.service.json/
searching for changes
no changes found
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.userinterface.selector
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 13 changes to 13 files
13 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
pulling from https://code.openbravo.com/erp/mods/org.openbravo.userinterface.smartclient
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 3 changes to 3 files
3 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

You can easily hack this line by executing another Mercurial command, e.g. See what’s the status on each repository:

for i in $(ls -1); do cd $i; hg st; cd ..; done;

Update and build the latest pi

Assuming that you want to use the latest stable revision from pi, you can check our continuous integration framework and see what’s the latest revision that passed all the tests, then you can update your local repository to that revision and rebuild your system. Or you can copy this bash script (pi-update), and execute it inside your pi working copy:

#!/bin/bash
REVISION=`wget -q -O - http://builds.openbravo.com/job/erp_devel_pi-full-pgsql/lastSuccessfulBuild/changes | awk -F: '/https:\/\/code\.openbravo\.com\/erp\/devel\/pi\/rev\// {print substr($3,0,12)}' | head -n1`
hg pull
echo "Updating to rev $REVISION"
hg up -r $REVISION
ant smartbuild -Dlocal=no

This script uses wget and awk to get the latest revision from the last successful build page, pulls all the changesets of PI and updates your working copy to the detected revision, then updates your database and compiles the application.

Cleanup your working copy

The hg status command will tell you which files Mercurial doesn’t know about; it uses a “?” to display such files …

I often want to clean my working copy and remove all unversioned files. You can rid of those file by executing:

 hg st -nu | xargs rm -rf

That’s all folks! I’ll come back with more tips in the future. Disclaimer: I’m not a bash expert so I know that some of this commands could be simplified. I would also like to thank iarwain for simplifying some of this commands.