We are going to allow invoices with products that are not (yet) inserted
into the products table.
We always allowed to have products in invoices with a totally different
name, description, price, and whatnot, but until now we had the product
id in these invoice lines for statistics purposes.
However, Oriol raised the concern that this requires for the products
to be inserted before we can create an invoice with them, and we do not
plan to have a “create product while invoicing” feature, thus it would
mean that people would need to cancel the new invoice, create the new
product, and then start the invoice again from scratch.
The compromise is to allow products in the invoice that do not have a
product_id, meaning that at the time the invoice was created they were
not (yet) in the products table. Oriol sees this stop-invoice-create-
product issue more important than the accurate statistics of product
sales, as it will probably be only one or two units off, anyway.
I did not want to allow NULL values to the invoice product’s product_id
field, because NULL means “dunno” instead of “no product”, so i had to
split that field to a separate table that relates an invoice product
with a registered product.
jordi fita mas
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