Direct Invoice flow

Generally during direct invoice 3 transactions are generated: sales order, sales delivery and an invoice.Unfortunately there is no detailed documentation about this, but you can find all the changes in db by investigating all the calls done in write method of class cart (file sales/includes/cart_class.inc).

Janusz

We also would like a detailed account of all the database tables and fields that have data inserted into or updated when a direct invoice is submitted.
It will help us better integrate other systems with front accounting.

Thanks,
Dave

having looked at the cart_class.php file, it looks pretty simple. If I was doing something from php, that's certainly the way I would go.

However, the program I have to integrate is not php. what I have to do is write a glue script that will move data from it (stored in an rrd database and a MySQL database) to the frontaccounting database and make it look like I created a direct invoice from within frontaccounting.

It turns out the easiest way to see what was going on was to log the MySQL calls that frontaccounting made during the generation of a direct invoice. By manipulating the log it's pretty clear what is happening. There are lots of SELECT queries (which I expected to find) and three distinct transactions. One for the order, one for the delivery and one for the invoice. You really only have to pay attention to the UPDATE and INSERT statements to clearly understand it.

Given this information, I think I can write that glue script to run under a cron job. I still have a bit more digging to do before I try though. Frontaccounting uses a quite a few numerical symbols (such as "type" for transaction, etc..) that I need to get a handle on.

Hi guys,

It's a pity to say your code dealing directly with FA database content will not work with next FA major release (within month or so). This is _really_ not right way of integration unless you want to do the same work every couple of months on new releases,  or you prefer using current FA version forever.

Janusz

One of such a way is using cart class methods as Joe explained. Depending on target system you can include/call cart class directly using some thin php wrapper or implement external API (soap/xplrpc/hessian) to FA internal model functions.

Regarding custom fields/workflows you know my point of view, but seems that for some reason you are not really determined to turn this idea into reality as before .
Janusz

Ok, no problem. We are anyway busy with other matters currently.
Janusz

OK, first off, I have to agree with Janusz. It's not really the way to go by accessing the database directly, especially if I have to redo all the work every time a major new upgrade comes out.

We have used a variety of windows/unix/web accounting programs over the last 14 years and frontaccounting is by far the best we have used for our purposes. I keep thinking that gnue will go somewhere, but it been 14 years and counting since I started following that. Whatever we do, it has to work with frontaccounting.

Here is what we are trying to do...

We are running two business under 1 set of books. We have two DBA names because the businesses are so different and unrelated (Bookbinding and Wireless High Speed Internet).

Frontaccounting is set up under the Bookbinding business because that is the main one. The Wireless is a side effort but uses a different name because, lets face it, who would by Internet access from a old book guy :-)

Anyway, we have the bandwidth and threshold usage stored in an autogenerated rrd database. We also have a list of customers stored in a mysql database with what services they get billed for very month.

What I wanted was a script that would access the autobill information from mysql, then access the rrd database and determine if any additional bandwidth should be billed to the customer, generate an email invoice/statement combination and then insert the invoice information into frontaccounting as if I had manually inserted a direct invoice. This script would run just after midnight on the first of every month.

I wrote a first pass prototype of the script in bash (what an ugly kludge of a script!) It's 500 lines of database calls, and string manipulation. It was relatively easy to figure out what frontaccounting was doing by looking at the log, but I really would hate to do that again. If nothing else, the process was very informative of what frontaccounting was doing. (rather more complicated than some of the other accounting programs have been)

I wouldn't even bother posting the kludge. It's obviously not the way to go.

I've never really done much php scripting, but I guess now is as good a time as any. Can you run a php script from a cron job?