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How to create a Payment Terms Module

Contents

About this document

This document is part of the Localization Guide for Openbravo and describes the process of creating a module that includes the list of common payment terms used in a country.

Recommended articles

Before reading this howto it is important to have a clear understanding about the Modularity Concepts, specially the process of creating and packing modules.

The main objective of a payment terms module is to provide a dataset with the list of the payment terms commonly used in a concrete country. In case you haven't created yet a dataset, it is recommended to firstly read the How to create a Dataset article to get a general idea before moving to the particular scenario about payment terms.

From the functional side it is mandatory to understand the way payment terms are configured in Openbravo. Please read the Payment Term article for more information.

Estimated effort

A payment terms module is one of the easiest and fastest module to develop. Probably the only difficult part is to properly configure and test the payment terms we want to include into the module. In general creating a payment terms module should take a few hours for any experienced developer.


Introduction

A payment term specifies the way and period allowed to pay off an amount due. For example, a business partner may demand a deferred payment period of 30 days or may even demand to partially pay their debts or collects in two or more deferred periods.

An unique payment term must be associated with an invoice, and defines the list of scheduled payment/s -including a due date and an expected amount to be paid or collected- that will be generated when completing the invoice.

Although the payment terms depend on the agreements between the organization and the business partners, there is usually a list of the common payment terms used in a country, making it a perfect candidate for a localization module.

Defining the Payment Terms

Setting up the environment

Each time we work with datasets it is highly recommended to do it inside a clean client. This simple trick considerably reduces the risk of including wrong data inside our dataset.

As System Administrator, we create a new client called PaymentTerms:

LocGuide PaymentTerms 10.png

Now we should log out and log in inside our PaymentTerms client.

Entering the Payment Terms

On the Payment Term window of our recently created empty client, we must enter the Payment Terms to include into the module. Example of Payment Terms are: Immediate, 100% in 120 days, 50% in 30 days and 50% in 60 days, etc.

LocGuide PaymentTerms 20.png

Payment Terms Translation

Notice that the payment term name and description must be written in the country language. In case you country has several official languages, you can also define the correspondent translation inside the Translation tab.

LocGuide PaymentTerms 30.png

Once we have created the translations for all the payment terms we have two possibilities:

In the Dataset definition chapter we will see how to export these translations (and the rest of the payment terms configuration).

Creating the Payment Terms Module

At this point our PaymentTerms client should have all the payment terms that we would want to include into our module. It is the time to create it.

Module definition

As you already know, a payment terms module is like any other module that includes a dataset, so there are no special tricks for declaring it inside the Application Dictionary, but just some few considerations:

After the module's definition is ready, you should register the module in case you want to publish it in the Forge

Dataset Definition

Dataset definition is the key step in this process. A wrong dataset definition can waste all our previous work, so it is important to follow all these considerations:

LocGuide PaymentTerms 50.png

The dataset definition is ready, so we just need to export it to a file pressing the Export Reference Data button. This process queries the previous tables and gets all the records that fulfill the HQL/SQL Where clause, generating a XML file inside the module's referencedata/standard directory. As a fast check, you can open this file using any plain text editor and verify it contains several lines.

In case the file is empty, you should double check the dataset definition, specially the HQL/SQL Where clause used for each table.

Testing the Dataset

The real test to ensure the payment terms dataset is OK can be done inside our development instance. The test consists on creating a new client running the Initial Client Setup and selecting our payment terms module dataset at the Reference Data section.

LocGuide PaymentTerms 60.png

If the data inside the dataset are consistent, the Initial Client Setup Process should be completed successfully, otherwise it will fail giving a description about the error.

After a successful Initial Client Setup, we just need to login in the new client, go to the Payment Term window and check all the payment terms have been inserted.

Packaging the module

To generate the obx file we should follow the standard steps from the command line:

ant export.database
ant package.module -Dmodule=<payment methods module java package>

Considerations when releasing new versions

If you plan to release new versions of the payment terms module, you must remember some important aspects related to the common behaviour of datasets.

The considerations explained on the How to create a Taxes Module article can be directly extrapolated to this module, so please read this chapter before start working on the new version.

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