Monday, May 12, 2014

Creating a Client

Discovered and fixed a bug caused by recent changes: Confirming the insert window on Clients seemed to fail. In fact it was just the ml.dedupe.CheckedSubmitInsert action who failed to call rt.ar.set_response() with close_window=True.

Cannot order_by case-insensitive

Discovered a subtle but disturbing problem: ml.contacts.Persons does not ignore case when sorting alphabetically by name. It is funny that no Lino user has ever complained about that. But understandable: as long as users are disciplinated, they will always write a capital first letter for the name.

And yes, some other Django users obviously have had this problem before me, since the official documentation is clear:

There’s no way to specify whether ordering should be case sensitive. With respect to case-sensitivity, Django will order results however your database backend normally orders them.

(https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/ref/models/querysets/#order-by)

The best way to work around this is probably an invisible field “sort_name” which contains an all-uppercase version of the name. But see next section which explains why we leave this problem untouched for the moment.

Is MTI evil?

It is a bit sad then, that the name field must remain in Partner but is not used for Persons. To be meditated. Remeber that the “Partner” is not abstract because (IMHO that’s an important feature) we have many fields that can point to “some kind of partner”, that is, to “either a company, or a person, or a client”. Multi-table inheritance again. And Dan Greenfield wrote that it’s evil. And I didn’t believe him. And maybe I should convert.

What would change in Lino Welfare if I’d replace the current MTI structure for Partner (Person, Company, JobProvider, CourseProvider, Client) into a structure where there is a Partner model with only 3 fields:

  • partner_type

  • object_id

  • display_name

PartnerTypes would then be a ChoiceList. This structure is similar to what we have in lino.modlib.journals and lino.modlib.accounting. For the end-users this would be almost invisible.

  • There would be no (simple) table of all partners, sortable by something else than the name or the id. For example in the detail window of a city we could offer a table with all Clients in that city, another table with all companies in that city, but not one single table with all partners in that city.

  • The “is a person” and “is a company” checkboxes on PartnerDetail would go away.

A sub-question is: Should Client continue to inherit from Person? Should also the “is a client” checkbox on PersonDetail go away? Certain fields like “phone” and “birth_date” exist in Person and in Client. Without MTI we cannot handle this transparently.

Let’s answer No to that sub-question. So we would have three Partner types: “Organisation”, “Person” and “Household”. Clients are not a partner type but a special Person JobProviders are not a partner type but a special Company.

In that case we still would need something new: some automatism for creating a “partner account” per Person and per Client. Indee: not every Person requires a partner account (for example the minor children of a client). A “partner account” is required as soon as the user wants to write a postal address.

This idea is worth a case study when we have more time. For now we prefer to concentrate on more urgent issues in docs/tickets/93.

Weiter nach Baustellenbesichtigung

docs/tickets/93

The default color of a Calendar is now dynamically computed (maximum of existing colors + 1).

  • Kalenderfarben sind jetzt nicht mehr für alle gleich nach Migration.

  • jobs.StudiesByPerson : - es fehlten einige Kolonnen - Bezeichnung “Schule und Studien” ersetzt durch “Ausbildung und Studien” - Auswahlliste Ausbildungsarten sind jetzt wieder alfabetisch sortiert.

  • Die VSEs, Stellenanfragen und Art-60§7-Konventionen sind jetzt in einem einzigen Reiter “Verträge”.

  • Button links um Beziehungen erstellen zu können.

  • Neue Haushaltsrollen “Kind des Partners” und “Kind des Vorstands”. “Kind” bedeutet “Kind beider”.

  • Wenn meinen einen haushalt erstellt, werden jetzt die Kinder aus “Beziehungen” automatisch eingetragen.

  • Wenn man einen Haushalt löscht, werden jetzt auch automatisch alle Mitgliedschaften gelöscht.

  • Added new method meth:`dd.Model.after_ui_create.

  • Ehepartner und Freunde wurden doppelt importiert (von lino_welfare.scripts.load_plp).