For the same reasons as with expenses[0], users are no longer expected
to manually set invoice status, and is now linked to their collections.
In this case, however, we had to remove the ‘sent’ and ‘unpaid’ status
options, because these _should_ only be set manually, as there is no
way for the application to know when to set them. Thus, there could
be inconsistencies, like invoices set to ‘unpaid’ when they actually
have collections, or invoices that were ‘sent’, then transitioned to
‘partial’/‘paid’ due to a collection, but then reset to ‘created’ if the
collection was deleted.
[0]: ac0143b2b0
This is the same as a payment, but the user is the payee instead of the
payer.
I used a different relation than payment because i do not know any other
way to encode the constraint that only invoices can have a collection,
while expenses have only payments.
Besides the name and the fact that they are related to invoices, a
collection is pretty much the same as a payment.
Users are no longer expected to manually set the status of an expense
and, instead, have to add payments to such expense to mark it as partial
or paid.
That means that the PL/pgSQL functions must not accept a status
parameter, the edit and new forms should no longer have a field for
the status, and that the expense list should no longer have the “quick
edit” for their status. That’s why it no longer should have a pointer
cursor, unlike invoice or quote status.
This is to help up “sell” the service: people can look around the demo
to see whether it fits them. Of course, everyone should have the same
username in the demo.
We talked about having the username and password displayed above the
form in the template, but i think it makes more sense to give users as
little work as necessary. Plus, that means i do not have to write them
down while developing.
Whether the database is demo or not is not something that directly
depends on the environment, but rather on which database we are
connected to, thus an environment variable would not make much sense—it
has to be something of the database.
PostgreSQL has no PRAGMA application_id or PRAGMA user_version as with
SQLite to include application-specific values to the database. The
equivalent would be customized options[0], intended for modules
configuration, but that would require me to execute an ALTER DATABASE
in demo.sql with an specific datbase name, or force the use of psql to
run script the script, because then i can use the :DBNAME placeholder.
I guess that the most “standard” way is to just create a function that
returns a know value if the database is demo. Sqitch does not add that
function, therefore it is unlikely to be there by change unless it is
the demo database.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/runtime-config-custom.html
This is for users that belong to more than one company. It is just a
page with links to the home of each company that the user belongs to.
Had to add a second company to the demo data to test it properly, even
though i already have unit tests for multicompany, but, you know….
We need to have contacts with just a name: we need to assign
freelancer’s quote as expense linked the government, but of course we
do not have a phone or email for that “contact”, much less a VATIN or
other tax details.
It is also interesting for other expenses-only contacts to not have to
input all tax details, as we may not need to invoice then, thus are
useless for us, but sometimes it might be interesting to have them,
“just in case”.
Of course, i did not want to make nullable any of the tax details
required to generate an invoice, otherwise we could allow illegal
invoices. Therefore, that data had to go in a different relation,
and invoice’s foreign key update to point to that relation, not just
customer, or we would again be able to create invalid invoices.
We replaced the contact’s trade name with just name, because we do not
need _three_ names for a contact, but we _do_ need two: the one we use
to refer to them and the business name for tax purposes.
The new contact_phone, contact_web, and contact_email relations could be
simply a nullable field, but i did not see the point, since there are
not that many instances where i need any of this data.
Now company.taxDetailsForm is no longer “the same as contactForm with
some extra fields”, because i have to add a check whether the user needs
to invoice the contact, to check that the required values are there.
I have an additional problem with the contact form when not using
JavaScript: i must set the required field to all tax details fields to
avoid the “(optional)” suffix, and because they _are_ required when
that checkbox is enabled, but i can not set them optional when the check
is unchecked. My solution for now is to ignore the form validation,
and later i will add some JavaScript that adds the validation again,
so it will work in all cases.
This is to avoid the problem that if i mistype `company_id = 1` instead
of `company_id = $1`, like i fixed in ee0b5d0b, at least it won’t work
in testing now, as all IDs have a three digits number.
It all started when i wanted to try to filter invoices by multiple tags
using an “AND”, instead of “OR” as it was doing until now. But
something felt off and seemed to me that i was doing thing much more
complex than needed, all to be able to list the tags as a suggestion
in the input field—which i am not doing yet.
I found this article series[0] exploring different approaches for
tagging, which includes the one i was using, and comparing their
performance. I have not actually tested it, but it seems that i have
chosen the worst option, in both query time and storage.
I attempted to try using an array attribute to each table, which is more
or less the same they did in the articles but without using a separate
relation for tags, and i found out that all the queries were way easier
to write, and needed two joins less, so it was a no-brainer.
[0]: http://www.databasesoup.com/2015/01/tag-all-things.html
Initially, this field was meant to be left almost always blank, except
for when we deleted invoiced and had to “replace” its number with a new
invoice; using the automatic numbering in this cas would not “fill in”
the missing number in the sequence.
However, we decide to not allow removing invoicer not edit their
numbers, therefore, if everything goes as planned, there should not be
any gap in the sequence, and that field is rendered useless.
Oriol suggested making it a read-only field, both for new and edit
forms, but i do not think it makes sense to have a field if you can not
edit it at all, specially in the new invoice dialog, where it would
always be blank. In the edit form we already show the number in the
title and breadcrumbs, thus no need for the read-only field as
reference.
I still keep a Number member to the form struct, but is now a string
(kind of “a read-only field”, in a way) and just to be written in the
title or breadcrumbs. I did not like the idea of adding a new SQL
query just for that value.
With Oriol we agreed that products should have tags, too, and that the
“tag pool”, as it were, should be shared with the one for invoices and
contacts.
Had to add the `company_id` attribute in the `using` clause for `tag` in
`MustFillFromDatabase`, even though it’s not strictly necessary, because
then PostgreSQL does not know which `company_id` attribute use for the
join with `company`—the one from `product` or the one from `tag`.
With Oriol we agreed that contacts should have tags, too, and that the
“tag pool”, as it were, should be shared with the one for invoices (and
all future tags we might add).
I added the contact_tag relation and tag_contact function, just like
with invoices, and then realized that the SQL queries that Go had to
execute were becoming “complex” enough: i had to get not only the slug,
but the contact id to call tag_contact, and all inside a transaction.
Therefore, i opted to create the add_contact and edit_contact functions,
that mirror those for invoice and products, so now each “major” section
has these functions. They also simplified a bit the handling of the
VATIN and phone numbers, because it is now encapsuled inside the
PL/pgSQL function and Go does not know how to assemble the parts.
I had to use a deferrable foreign key because the payment methods have
a reference to the company, and the company now a circular reference to
payment method.
We want to show the percentage of the tax as columns in the invoice,
but until now it was not possible to have a single VAT column when
products have different VAT (e.g., 4 % and 10 %), because, as far
as the application is concerned, these where ”different taxes”. We
also think it would be hard later on to compute the tax due to the
government.
So, tax classes is just a taxonomy to be able to have different names
and rates for the same type of tax, mostly VAT and retention in our
case.
I was using explicit IDs because i need them to satisfy foreign key
constraints, and also to look them up within the file, but then i had
the problem that the sequences would be left at 1, preventing me to
add new contacts or products, for instance.
Now i use the sequence exactly how the application will (i.e., with
default values), but i have to reset them to 1 to make the ID stable
even when i make tests with pgTAP on the same database.
At first we thought that a regular text field would do, because we were
afraid that a dropdown would be worse from the point of view of user
experience, but then we realized that we need the country code for VAT
and phone validation, and we can not expect users to input that, of
course.
I had to add the first “i18n table” to the database with the name of all
countries in both Catalan and Spanish and Catalan; English is the
default. For now i think i do not need a view that would select the
name based on the locale of the current request, because currently i do
not plan on adding any other such table —the currency uses the code and
the symbol, thus no need for localization.
However, now i need the language tag from the locale in order to get the
correct translation, and gotext does not give me any way to access the
inner language. Thus the need for our Locale type.
I do not have more time to update the update to the company today, but i
believe this is already a good amount of work for a commit.
The company is going to be used for row level security, as users will
only have access to the data from companies they are granted access, by
virtue of being in the company_user relation.
I did not know how add a row level security policy to the company_user
because i needed the to select on the same relation and this is not
allowed, because it would create an infinite loop.
Had to add the vat, pg_libphonenumber, and uri extensions in order to
validate VAT identification numbers, phone numbers, and URIs,
repectively. These libraries are not in Debian, but i created packages
for them all in https://dev.tandem.ws/tandem.
jordi fita mas