Automating Attachments process in Openbravo and the Newton’s third law of Motion

Great people at times gets it right. I love the relativity theory and his third law of motion. Being in client place and in my work place defines the theory of relativity and well it’s the Newton’s third law that inspired to do something about which I am posting now. I had to work on a Excel processing scenario where data in the form of excel was to be transmitted between Openbravo and another legacy System (I prefer to call .N**  applications legacy systems). Filling the * is left to your imagination.

For data import, I first thought to create an import process like this, but then it was a day to day transaction, so thought it was not so efficient for auditing process. So I decided to use the Openbravo Attachments. So the user uploads an excels and saves the record and I process it accordingly. Part 1 complete. The next stage was creating a report for legacy system and providing it to the user. First I generated it in a particular drive and then users would access it. That was not proving to be good due to many access issues. Then I tried to create a File Dialog reference that would save the file in the location which user specifies. But then the question arises, what if the data is lost somewhere and an user tells he never downloaded it?

Then Newton came to my rescue. The attachments process in Openbravo has a cool feature that I decided to leverage. Not only can users attach files to a record, but they can also download files from an record. So in accordance to the Newton’s third law, if I could process an excel that user had uploaded, why can’t I create an excel and attach an record it to it and let the user download it? Having it operational was the only thing that occupied my mind for about an week.

How attachment works in Openbravo:

When you attach a file to a record, there is a folder created inside the attachment folder (the attachment folder is configured while setting up the instance as mentioned here). The name of the folder will be “tableid-recordid” , where tableid is the unique id of the corresponding table and recordid is the unique id of the record you are planning to attach.Then there is a record created in the C_File table with the File Name, Record Id, TableId. This is interpreted in the application and is presented to us in the application.

This is how my record will be (it’s in Classic UI).

Once the user clicks on the user clicks the Generate Process , a file is created, a folder with the recordid and tableid is created and an entry is made is in the C_File table. Easy. Done. We have attached the excel to the record. This is how the record looks now.

Now the user can just click the pointed button and download the corresponding excel file. :).

May be it will be useful in any of your interactions with legacy systems…:)

PeopleSoft Data Archive Manager

PeopleSoft’s Data Archive Manager offers an excellent framework for building archival scenarios. Due to its nativity, Data Archive Manager intuitively understands relationship between tables while creating scripts to archive data. There is no compromise on data integrity and no data is lost while archiving. By design, Data Archive Manager offers seamless archive and restore options. Personally, I like the fact that at every stage in the process, Data Archive Manager audits the data moved back and forth to a row-count level of accuracy.

And oh, did I mention that Data Archive Manager is bundled along with PeopleSoft, so you don’t have to buy expensive licenses to third-party tools for managing your PeopleSoft data.