Book Image

Apache OfBiz Cookbook

Book Image

Apache OfBiz Cookbook

Overview of this book

Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that provides a common data model and an extensive set of business processes. But without proper guidance on developing performance-critical applications, it is easy to make the wrong design and technology decisions. The power and promise of Apache OFBiz is comprehensively revealed in a collection of self-contained, quick, practical recipes in this Cookbook. This book covers a range of topics from initial system setup to web application and HTML page creation, Java development, and data maintenance tasks. Focusing on a series of the most commonly performed OFBiz tasks, it provides clear, cogent, and easy-to-follow instructions designed to make the most of your OFBiz experience. Let this book be your guide to enhancing your OFBiz productivity by saving you valuable time. Written specifically to give clear and straightforward answers to the most commonly asked OFBiz questions, this compendium of OFBiz recipes will show you everything you need to know to get things done in OFBiz. Whether you are new to OFBiz or an old pro, you are sure to find many useful hints and handy tips here. Topics range from getting started to configuration and system setup, security and database management through the final stages of developing and testing new OFBiz applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Apache OFBiz Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Mapping database data types


One of the primary benefits of using the Entity Engine over direct SQL calls to access data is that OFBiz abstracts the details of how data is physically stored, away from the user. When making a request for data through the Entity Engine, the user does not need to know where the data is physically located or how it is formatted. The Entity Engine handles all the details of data mapping for the user in real time.

Since physical data storage formatting varies widely from database vendor to vendor, the Entity Engine must map these variations to consistent data type values for use within the OFBiz framework.

Getting ready

The following steps have to be performed before adding or modifying data type mapping:

  1. 1. Entity engine field types are configured in separate field type definition files, one for each database in use. To determine which field type definition file to use, consult the entityengine.xml file. Each field type file is defined with a field-type-name element...