Hello, A shipping company client of mine needs to replace their current operations management software. I would like to build a solution based on ofbiz, with a plugin designed to manage their operations.
The company creates Jobs to represent orders/instructions from their customers. Each job can have a number of involved parties, including potentially multiple parties being invoiced for different parts of the job. The new plugin should be able to replicate the company's Jobs with the introduction of some Job related entities. Please see attached diagram. Eventually the operations software would need to generate invoices, email them to customers and post relevant information to accounting ledgers. Therefore I thought I would really need to link a Job with an Order. When reading the code behind OrderServices#createOrder I noticed that to create a SALES_ORDER it was necessary to include a productStoreId. It seems that if I try to make use of the existing createOrder method I will need to set up some other 'infrastructure' to make the company appear a bit more like an ecommerce environment. Is it appropriate for me to link Jobs to Orders in this way, or should I be keeping the two entities separate and find an alternative way to manage invoices? If appropriate to link Jobs to Orders, should I avoid using the existing OrderServices#createOrder method and just construct entities as needed for my plugin's needs, or should I create any entities createOrder might need (such as productId) to ensure Orders are constructed in a consistent manner for use in other parts of ofbiz? Any comments or suggestions greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Dan. [image: image.png] -- Daniel Watford
