Here are my notes on adding support for purchase orders.
- Created purchaseorders.xsl, purchaseorderform.xsl and the i18n purchaseorders.xml files.
- Edited accounting_menu.xsl and i18n/titles.xml
- Edited sitemap.xml, copied and pasted entire checks section and renamed everything to scope of purchase orders.
The last step I mention there is the one I'm interested in examining. Does it make sense to combine all the business processes into a single set of gates? How difficult would that be, and what would be gained?
First off, the retrieval of entry metadata may be better off combined. Right now they all do the same thing, but reference different XML document nodes. To do this, I'll have to rename the node in the retrieval of business object entries, and at the moment I can't think of a reason not to do that. If I do that, I'll then have to update the XSL which references it as well (like the business object forms, i.e. check_form.xsl), and also any other queries.
If I were to go this far, I might as well consolidate the retrieval of all business object entries as well. But actually that wouldn't work at all because those queries get specific metadata to ease the creation of the table view. In other words, specializing the queries to retrieve business object entries saves a boatload of complex XSL.
I just changed over the checks metadata retrieval query and it was too hard, actually just took a few minutes. Now on to the rest: invoices, deposits, and bills.
