Apache OFBiz News November 2016

Welcome to our regular monthly round-up of OFBiz news.
This month we have news about the OFBiz track at Apachecon EU, a brainstorming session that will help give the project a strategy and the our latest version 16.11.01 is released.

OFBiz @ Apachecon EU Seville

Once again Apachecon EU featured an OFBiz track. Five talks were selected covering a range of topics including suggestions for improving the user interface and user experience, functional testing, data extraction and the new OFBiz plug in manager. The sessions and their attendance figures are listed below:

  • OFBiz +Modern UI (13)
  • Collaborative Approach to Automated UI Testing (16)
  • Introducing Plug In Manager (10)
  • Data Extraction: How to get your data out of OFBiz (10)
  • Screen Rendering in OFBiz (10)

Slides from all the presentations are now available on the Wiki. All talks were also recorded and will soon be available on Feathercast.

Apachecon is always a good place to meetup and as usual whenever our community get together we talk, so we held an informal brainstorming session and also a mini OFBiz hackathon.

We also met up with Paul KIng from the Apache Groovy project who was presenting a couple of sessions. OFBiz is currently working on replacing our existing Minilang DSL with Groovy so these presentations could be very useful for the community. If you would like more information about the Groovy workffort for OFBiz then see the following page:

Groovy for OFBiz Business Logic.

This is a great example example of how being at Apachecon connects you with other projects.

Current Project Discussions

During Apachecon we held a brainstorming session where we all got together to come up with some potential ideas for improvements to take back to the mailing lists. A summary of the session can be found on the Wiki.

The session resulted in three main discussion threads being raised on the mailing lists:

  • Defining an OFBiz Project Strategy
  • Improving the OFBiz User Interface
  • Organising OFBiz Events or Meetups

All three discussions are now in progress and we encourage everyone from the community to participate. If you would like to contribute to the discussions, share ideas or give feedback on what has already been discussed then please see our development mailings lists.

OFBiz 16.11.01 Released

Last month we mentioned the preparations for our next release. During this month the vote was finalised and the 16.11.01 release was announced. This release consolidates all the hard work that the community has put in over the last year. The whole 16.11 series is dedicated to the memory of Adrian Crum who died earlier this year.

The new release features Gradle as the new build system, extensive refactoring, and also inbuilt unit test and plug in manager system. The project will continue in its refactoring effort to clean up code and improve efficiency.

New features and improvements

Functional enhancements and improvements as well as updates of third party libraries and source code refactoring:

Bugfixes

Functional and technical bugfixes:

  • Page bottom navigation problem with grid and include-grid (OFBIZ-7648)
  • Catch GenericEntityException and GenericServiceException and other instead of Exception in Java classes.
    (OFBIZ-8909)(OFBIZ-8910)(OFBIZ-8911)(OFBIZ-8912)(OFBIZ-8913)(OFBIZ-8914)(OFBIZ-8915)(OFBIZ-8917)(OFBIZ-8918)(OFBIZ-8919)(OFBIZ-8920)(OFBIZ-8921)(OFBIZ-8922)
  • UI Label in file CommonErrorUiLabels.xml (OFBIZ-9046)
  • Use proper main-action for permission-service, it should be VIEW instead of READ.
  • Update Services that sets non-pk fields to null if not passed, if non-pks not passed than it should remain unupdated (OFBIZ-8722)
  • Incorrect required parameters set on following services, mark required parameters as option false as service in parameter. createWorkEffortKeywords, createWorkEffortQuote, createWorkEffortRequest, createWorkEffortRequestItem, createWorkEffortRequestItemAndRequestItem, createWorkEffortReview, createWorkRequirementFulfillment (OFBIZ-8602)(OFBIZ-8603)(OFBIZ-8604)(OFBIZ-8605)(OFBIZ-8620)(OFBIZ-8621)(OFBIZ-8622)
  • Set required parameter as option false at service definition level (OFBIZ-8358)
  • Entity Auto services set remaining fields to null when passed only required fields (OFBIZ-8723)
  • Fixed console warning introduced in revision#1768253 (OFBIZ-8358)
  • Reversed key and description of Type drop-down on Bom Simulation
  • Wrong termination of element "if-compare-field"
  • Search operation on 'AllExamplesWithDesiredCustomerFeaturesReport' entity causing exception (OFBIZ-8822)
    Steps to regenerate: 1. Go to Entity Data Maintenance in webtools 2. Search entity 'AllExamplesWithDesiredCustomerFeaturesReport'. Click and go to the overview page. 3. Click on the Search button.
  • Reversed key and description of Taxable Flag drop-down on Add a new invoice Item
  • Fixed incorrect closing of set-service-fields.
  • Removed extra greater than sign from if-compare-filed tag, found while reading console log.
  • Passes required parameter contactMechTypeId while calling createPartyContactMech form copyPartyContactMechs service. Also pass same parameter in testCreatePartyContactMech test case service.
  • Conveted createInvoiceContactMech service form entity-auto to simple method, there is an bug in EntityAutoEngine. It causing test case failure. This is an quick fix. EntityAuto bug reported under ticket id OFBIZ-9117
  • Wrong label definition from PartyUiLabels.xml. In PartyUiLabels.xml the PartyCountryMissing label has been deleted but is still in use in one file Fix: Use the CommonCountryMissing label from CommonUiLabels instead (OFBIZ-9120)
  • Lookup of initial account in new opportunity doesn't work (OFBIZ-8617)
  • Layered-modal hyperlink doesn't show style (OFBIZ-7323)
  • ConfigXMLReader doesn't verify if "transaction-timeout" is set before trying to unbox (OFBIZ-8342)
    site-conf.xsd doesn't define transaction-timeout as being mandatory but ConfigXMLReader treats it as one and in the absence of the attribute an exception is being thrown causing the application to break.
  • SimpleMethod: Problem with Variables in key-fields (OFBIZ-9126)
  • Errormessage is displayed twice in LoginEvents.java (OFBIZ-9125)