How to automatically populate search keys

Introduction

Search keys are user defined identifiers or codes that allow to easily retrieve reference data such as customers, suppliers, products, payment terms, etc. They have been introduced in earlier versions of Openbravo and up to Openbravo 2.50 they were an effective way to enter data quickly. For example, while entering an invoice you could select the customer by opening the selector window and searching for it or, if you knew the search key of the customer that you were looking for, you could enter it and press ENTER; the system would then search the right customer based on that key and replace the key you entered with the customer name.

In Openbravo 3, selectors have changed and they now automatically suggest the right value as you type. Going back to the previous example, you can now start typing the customer name on your invoice and the system automatically suggests the customers that match that entry as you type; once you have typed enough characters to have a unique match, you can confirm the selection by simply pressing ENTER or TAB and moving to the next field.

This new technology is much more dynamic and user friendly. It also made search keys no longer needed for most entities. You can re-purpose the search key on product to store product codes - if you use product codes - or to store customer numbers on customers; however, on m and, after a while, that can be a bit annoying any other entities (product categories, business partner categories, etc.), there is really no longer a need to have a search key any longer.

In many cases users end up entering the same value in the search key as they enter in the name.

This article explains how you can configure Openbravo to automatically populate the Search Key fields and save time for your users.

Execution Steps

In Openbravo sequences are specific fields and they need to obey to specific naming convention (the column needs to be named DocumentNo), so a regular sequence was not an option in this case.

Luckily Openbravo is very flexible and you can always find a solution for your problem. In this case, we take inspiration from the technique used to automatically number invoice lines (each invoice line has a number that automatically increases by 10 for every line) and apply it to search keys.

Let's suppose that the search key that you want to automatically generate is the one for business partners. Here is how you do it.

• Login as system administrator
• You are going to have to make a modification to core, so you need to make sure that there is an active configuration template in your system with status In Development.

Configuration templates are modules that contain changes to either core or to other modules. Using configuration templates you can personalize the core behavior of the system without affecting your ability to apply maintenance packs and updates. You create a configuration template either by manually creating a module of type template or by putting your system in configuration mode.

• Navigate to the Windows, Tabs and Fields window and query the Business Partner window. From there choose the appropriate tab and the look into the Field tab.

There you can find the field called Search Key and identify which column of which table it is based on. In this case the column is C_BPARTNER.VALUE. You can navigate to that column definition using the Open on Tab feature of Openbravo 3.

• In that column, you can enter a new defaulting rule based on the following SQL statement (see screenshot):

@SQL=SELECT TO_CHAR(MAX(TO_NUMBER(value))+1,'FM00000000') FROM c_bpartner WHERE ad_client_id =@AD_CLIENT_ID@ AND value LIKE '0%'

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• Let's analyze this rule.
  • @SQL means that this default is not going to be interpreted as a constant but as a SQL statement to be executed and the default is the result of that statement.
  • The select statement selects the maximum previous value of the search key for business partners in this same client and increments it by one.
  • The where clause uses the @AD_CLIENT_ID@ expression that identifies the current client at run time; this enables different clients in a multi-tenant environment to be agnostic to each other.
  • The "value LIKE '0%'" clause is used to avoid interference with existing values; if you have already created business partners and they have search keys that start with anything else than '0', this clause allows you to ignore them.
  • The select statement needs to make a few data type conversions. Value is a string, so its content first needs to be converted to a number; the maximum value, need to the be increased by one and converted back to string with a format of 8 digits.
  • To figure out how many digits you need, think of what is the maximum number of business partners that you will ever have and add 2 or 3 orders of magnitude just to be on the safe side.
• Since you have created a configuration template, make sure to export it so that you will not have problems with your next update. Connect to the command line in your server and run the following command:

ant export.database export.config.script -Dforce=true

Now you are ready to enjoy a faster data entry for your customers. The next time that you go to the Business Partner window and you start creating a customer, the system will generate the Search Key for you and your customers will be effortlessly numbered as 00000001, 00000002, 00000003, 00000004, etc.

One last tip... by default, te Search Key field is the first focus field for the Business Partner window. Since you will not need to enter it any more, you might want to skip it and put the focus straight into the Commercial Name field, so that you can save one click at data entry time. You can do that either as system administrator or, if you use Openbravo Professional Edition, as an end user thanks to the great Forms Personalization feature.