Summary of news from the Apache OFBiz community

This month we have new committers, a new Apache OFBiz release and ongoing discussions of various new subjects.

New Committers

The community welcomes Taher Alkhateeb, Michael Brohl, Christian Carlow, Divesh Dutta, Shi Jinghai, Julien Nicolas and Arun Patidar as new committers. We are looking forward to enjoyable collaborations!


Do you want to know more about our committers and the Project Management Commitee (PMC)? If so, then take a look at PMC and Committers list.

New OFBiz Release 13.07.02

The community has announced the availability of the new bugfix release Apache OFBiz 13.07.02, you can find more infomation in our previous blog entry.

Ongoing discussions and votes

We have a had a lot of active discussion on our mailing lists this month and a range of new topics have been raised. See below for a summary.

Subversion and Git

There have been a lot of discussion about moving from Subversion to Git as the source code management system for the project and during this month, a vote on the subject was perforned. The result shows that the community needs more discussion and does not currently want to make the move.

Upgrading to Java 8

Java 7 is out of support as of April 2015. There is lazy consensus (no vote) to use Java 8 functionality for the next upcoming branch 14.12. The community is aware of backwards compatibility issues and some initial efforts have been made to make OFBiz Java 8 compatible. See the discussion thread in the mailing list archives.

Addons for OFBiz

There is an interesting ongoing discussion about making the OFBiz system more modular and allow it to be able to use addons. This would make it easier to develop third party functionality and have some kind of OFBiz marketplace for new features. The discussion thread is also about more functionality, a better user experience, new UI and related topics. If you are interested in knowing more then please take a look at the discussion thread in our mailinglist.

OFBiz Online documentation

We are currently discussing improvements to enhance the online documentation. This covers the help contents as well as the technical solution.The goal is to provide better and more comprehensive documentation and also to create a strong technical foundation which allows more people to contribute without too much hassle. Follow the discussion in this thread.



See below for the detailed enhancements and bug fixes from May 2015.

New features and improvements

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

  • Improvements of the start code
    • Start.java
      • Javadoc fixes
      • debug code removed
      • Optimization: move array creation outside loop so it is created only once.
    • ComponentLoaderConfig.java
      • Thread safety
      • Optimization
      • Code cleanup
      • Improved error handling
    • ComponentContainer.java:
      • Improved thread safety
      • Optimization
      • Code cleanup
      • Use String constant instead of hard-coded value
  • Improved dialog boxes generated by ajax-window link parameter (OFBIZ-6359)
  • Replaced Beanshell (bsh) code with Groovy code in ORDER screens, forms and menus (OFBIZ-6340) and other components (OFBIZ-6332)
  • Library updates
    • Removed commons-cli jar that was not used
    • Updated Log4j 2.2 to 2.3 (OFBIZ-6380)
  • Minilang Compare.java: Replace ClassCastException with type check (OFBIZ-6291)
  • Added locale and timeZone as a service IN parameter for groovy dsl. When locale and timeZone are not passed as service IN parameter, now the groovy dsl will get it from the context and passe it as service IN parameter.
  • Added EmplPositionType CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, CCO, CSO and ReponsibilityType GENERAL_MGMT, INFO_MGMT, MKTG_MGMT, COMPLI_MGMT, SECUR_MGMT for CEO to applications/humanres/data/HumanResTypeData.xml (OFBIZ-6389)
  • Performance improvement for creating OrderItemAttributes during store/update Order (OFBIZ-6258)
  • Widgets:
    • Added a new attribute ignore-when (similar to use-when) to decide rendering a field in list or multi form (OFBIZ-4481)
    • Added a read-only attribute to the text input field (OFBIZ-6395)
  • Added missing BIRT libs in Eclipse .classpath file to support hot code replacement configuration (OFBIZ-6317)
  • Humanres: Support all JobRequisition.qualification PartyQualTypes for RecruitmentForms.xml#EditJobRequisition (OFBIZ-6393)
  • Order Manager:
    • Option to pass file name as OrderId for the generated confirmation or invoice PDF (OFBIZ-4480)
    • Give the order notification email attachment the orderId as filename (OFBIZ-6238)
  • Catalog Manager's EditProduct screen HTML should place a limit on the size of text that can be entered in the Product Description box (OFBIZ-6312). This introduces a new maxlength attribute to the textarea element in forms and applies the maxlength (255 chars) value in several FTL files, when the DB is limiting the length.
  • Improved configurability of OFBiz regarding multi-tenancy (OFBIZ-6164)
    • added configuration options for sfa (OFBIZ-6190)
      improved configuration options for search/find screens in project manager (OFBIZ-6162)
    • ModelFormField.java: Removed unnecessary double checks and corrected exception handling where the catched exception was too broad (OFBIZ-6420).
  • Functionality to add WebSitePathAlias records is missing (OFBIZ-5679). This adds a "Create Website Path Alias" menu item to the WebSiteAliases view and allows to edit/delete the entries.
  • Translations
    • Translated the framework, Content, Order, Party, WorkEffort and Accounting components to Arabic (OFBIZ-6432).
    • German translations for various applications (OFBIZ-6305). Added translations (entity, error, UI) for the Product, Party and Order component.

Bugfixes

Functional and technical bugfixes:

  • Fixed the way the FOP baseUrl was set. This was due to a change introduced for "Allow FOP to support for -Dportoffset" at (OFBIZ-6120)
  • Security bug in the ecommerce application. Anyone can view any quote or request in the system regardless of the associated partyId via URL parameter manipulation (OFBIZ-6207)
  • When used setDependentDropdownValuesJs.ftl precludes focus-field-name (OFBIZ-6346)
  • Some fields are missing in the person simple-map-processor. After some additions on the Person entity definition the person simple-map-processor has not been updated (OFBIZ-6357)
  • Fixed class cast exception for "Render Star Schema Report" page.
  • ListQuoteItems quoteItemSeqId button not showing due to ${bsh} (OFBIZ-6351), fixed similar bsh issue for ListQuoteAdjustments form as well.
  • Upload function does not work on Party Manager (OFBIZ-6251). Upgraded commons-compress jar from 1.4.1 to 1.9
  • Create PO flow is broken (OFBIZ-6382)
  • FindGeneric.groovy: Fixed fieldsToSelect type from list to set as find method accept fieldsToSelect as set.
  • CategoryContentWrapper ignores session locale (OFBIZ-6262)
  • Malfunction of configurable FTL-Template caching in DataResourceWorker.renderDataResourceAsText (OFBIZ-6329)
  • ProductStoreData.xml contains UPS NEXT_DAY not present in ShippingData.xml (OFBIZ-6216)
  • Cutting List Report from Manufacturing Shipment Plans throws error due to missing EntityCondition import (OFBIZ-5916)
  • Scrum forms: Added missing value field for entity-one tag (OFBIZ-5974)
  • Form ListRequestItemNotes is not referenced in Screens (OFBIZ-5971)
  • Duplicate referredByPartyId field for EmployementAppForms.xml#ListEmployementApps at humanres/control/FindEmploymentApps (OFBIZ-6387)
  • Make background-color in setSourceColor function in fieldlookup.js theme dependent (OFBIZ-6371)
  • Date formats displayed in the title of the input field are not correctly showing the default format for UK but the actual date itself is correct (OFBIZ-5610)
  • CategoryWorker.getRelatedCategoriesRet ignores recursive-flag (OFBIZ-6373)
  • Empty availabilityStatusId widget dropdown for statusTypeId WEFA_AVAILABILITY of ProductionRunTaskFixedAssets and AddProductionRunTaskFixedAsset (OFBIZ-6368)
  • Survey: FTL error message when using Enumeration or Geo question type (OFBIZ-6397)
  • Field Lookup do not show description when widget-verbose is set to false (OFBIZ-6396)
  • Drop-down widget field with allow-multiple="true" does not display current value (OFBIZ-6414).
    ModelFormField.getEntry returns the string representation of the value corresponding to the field in either the context map or parameters map but when the value is returned as a list [X, Y, Z], the opening and closing brackets were encoded [X, Y, Z]. This prevents the FormRenderer from detecting a list object from the string and converting it back to a list. The solution detects a collection value and handles the proper encoding.
  • createConditionList doesn't handle widget dropdown multi-submitted values when called by performFind (OFBIZ-6310). Adds detection if the field value represents a collection and in this case sets EntityOperator.IN instead of EntityOperator.EQUALS.
  • renderTextFindField doesn't reselect operation dropdown or ignoreCase checkbox (OFBIZ-6415)
  • Fix and improvement for creation of new Geos (OFBIZ-6229), handles the following problems
    • The search screen results take you to the link geos. It should go directly to create / edit instead
    • You cannot edit a geo because the parameter is not passed across the tabs link and edit / create. The menus should be redefined to pass the parameter around
    • The primary key is enforced in the service definition when it should be optional to create new geos
      the geoId should not be a lookup field as an entity cannot lookup itself
  • renderDateFindField doesn't reselect operation (OFBIZ-6417)

Documentation

Updates and improvements of the documentation:

  • Missing license informations in Seo*.xml files added (OFBIZ-6388)