Hi,
I have raised this with Phocas previously, but has not been addressed, so I though I would document it here. Our use of rebates has meant that we have 14 project (with more planned), currently updating the design of the rebates database is becoming very hard to manage for the following reasons:
- Too many feeds to configure:
This is just a snippet of all the feeds that need to be added/adjusted this causes considerable duplication of effort (consider if you need to signify the currency of the rebate project, you would need to add a new expression to every posted/unposted feed). Having a view which rolls up all the project feeds into a single feed:
- Brackets Feed (all Brackets)
- Calculations (all Calcs)
- Posted Trans (all Trans)
- UnPosted Trans (all Trans)
- Rules (all Rules)
This would make development significantly easier as we only put one feed for all rebate information of that type, plus any new projects will naturally be added to the singular feed with no need for additional development work.
- The feeds to have more narative information.
For example none of the feed information states the Project name, this has to be hardcoded on the Posted/UnPosted Transaction feeds so we can select them in the dashboard:
There are other elements that would be value add based on narative information which is not present in the base feed.
This is one of several expressions that we have had to add, so with 14 projects * 2 feeds (posted/Unposted) = 28 Expressions, I am currently handling over 100 expressions!, a large proportion of these could be removed with the naratives of project, rebate,bracket information added to the feeds.
Having a consolidated view which merges all the feeds toegther makes considerable sense, furthermore, having the narative information alos applied to each of these merged views will allow less expressions to be created and provide a more robust database design.
Hope this makes sense?
Regards,
Jon