Merge lp:~invitu/ocb-server/7.0 into lp:ocb-server

[invitu]

[IMP] fix-1191374 : birthdate field in res_partner should be "Date" instead of "Char"

[Stefan Rijnhart (Opener) (stefan-opener)]

Hi Invitu,

in practice, you do not need a year of birth to congratulate a partner/customer on his birthday. Having this a date field, you would always need a year of birth which makes it more awkward to harvest this kind of information. Incorrect years of birth in your database are also more likely to occur, as you would always need to enter something for the year. This could lead to slightly embarrassing situations.

I do not think this is a good idea functionally, sorry. Apart from that, this change is likely to lose existing birthdates in the database with no clear way how to handle the potentially unstructured character of the current data in a migration script. In this case, you probably should create a custom module that replaces this field in your own databases.

review: Disapprove (functionally, migratory)

[Holger Brunn (Therp) (hbrunn)]

I agree with Stefan. Setting the MP to rejected then.

review: Disapprove

[Ronald Portier (Therp) (rportier1962)]

I think in this case I have to disagree with my estimated collegues Stefan and Holger.

IMHO there are many cases where a real birthdate is required.

I dont really don't know any real business case for just a birthday. Which company is really sending congratulations on birthdays?

But is if a partner is a employee, we are required to know the exact date of birth. Or there are special arrangement for employee's older then x years.

The same for consumers. We might be required to register their date of birth. For instance if we sell alcoholic drinks, or other things that might have an age limit.

Or our "customers" might be patients in a hospital application.

So I can think of many reasons to need an exact date of birth, but hardly any reason at all to register just the day and month.

Of course there is the legitimate concern on how to convert the existing data. In practice most dates can be recognized even from unstructured data, if only the most likely order for MM-DD or DD_MM is selected.

[Holger Brunn (Therp) (hbrunn)]

very good points. unrejecting for further discussion

[Stefan Rijnhart (Opener) (stefan-opener)]

Hi Ronald,

to clarify, I think replacing this field in OpenERP addons trunk is certainly an option (there are pros and cons) but I think this change is too disruptive to have a place in the backports. Do you think that having this change in the backports, with its inevitable and from a user perspective, unexpected data loss is warranted?

[invitu (invitu)]

ok, I tested your data loss idea and it works ;-) (I mean the existing data are lost)

I agree with your proposal to make a custom field

[Stefan Rijnhart (Opener) (stefan-opener)]

Thanks for sharing your opinion, Invitu. Setting this MP to rejected (for lack of a status 'retracted') as per your comment.

[Ronald Portier (Therp) (rportier1962)]

I think it is OK this proposal is rejected for backports. But it will definitely be a good idea to have a real birthdate date field on trunk.

[Alexandre Fayolle - camptocamp (alexandre-fayolle-c2c)]

the thing is, it is different to store a birthday (which should still be machine parseable) and a birthdate.

When the field is called birthdate, I expect a date.

Unmerged revisions

5023. By invitu on 2013-06-15

[IMP] fix-1191374 : birthdate field in res_partner should be "Date" instead of "Char"

=== modified file 'openerp/addons/base/res/res_partner.py'
--- openerp/addons/base/res/res_partner.py	2013-06-12 09:53:00 +0000
+++ openerp/addons/base/res/res_partner.py	2013-06-15 18:43:28 +0000
@@ -255,7 +255,7 @@
         'phone': fields.char('Phone', size=64),
         'fax': fields.char('Fax', size=64),
         'mobile': fields.char('Mobile', size=64),
-        'birthdate': fields.char('Birthdate', size=64),
+        'birthdate': fields.date('Birthdate'),
         'is_company': fields.boolean('Is a Company', help="Check if the contact is a company, otherwise it is a person"),
         'use_parent_address': fields.boolean('Use Company Address', help="Select this if you want to set company's address information  for this contact"),
         # image: all image fields are base64 encoded and PIL-supported