Contacts ProspectNo Change

[Ernst]

My Customer is really keen to be able to change the ProspectNo in Contacts. (currently greyed out)

Ive made a plugin which adds a button, to contact maintenance to change accountno.

But is there any risk to rest of JIWA if we do this?

Just wondering why JIWA made it non modifiable in first place?

Can Attach plugin is this is going to be useful to other....I save the old accountno in Notes, so we can refer to what it was..

[Mike.Sheen]

Just wondering why JIWA made it non modifiable in first place?

We don't let you modify the identifier type fields anywhere once the record is saved. Debtor Account No, Sales Order No, Creditor Account No - they all behave the same and do not allow edit of that field once created.

For fraud prevention reasons you shouldn't be able to modify a Sales Order (Invoice) No.

An inventory items Part No. is also not supposed to be changed, as existing documents - including ones like sales orders, you've sent to the customer and changing the inventory Part No. invalidates that document. So we don't let you do that.

Another underlying reason is because it's often used by people and external systems as a pseudo primary key - an external CRM system might use the ProspectNo from contacts as the primary key instead of the ProspectID (which is not visible to the user) for associating a record in the CRM with a prospect in Jiwa.

It's not recommended to do that, but people do.

But is there any risk to rest of JIWA if we do this?

Maybe. Only way for me to know is go through the code, to look for references to the ProspectNo field / column and try to work it if there is an obvious issue - and even then I'd want to actually do a bunch of tests to see for sure.

That's more effort I personally am willing to do... so the official recommendation is to not change fields the software is preventing you from changing.

[SBarnes]

My Customer is really keen to be able to change the ProspectNo in Contacts. (currently greyed out)

What is the objective in being able to do this, as I agree with everything Mike has said but if you explain what is trying to be achieved there may be another way of coming at this?

[Ernst]

Hi Stuart,

The customer supplies building material, SO even though the sale may be to a Hardware store (Bunnings), he keeps track of the builder, plasterer etc by linking a contact to the sales order on the custom field.

So in fixing up incorrectly spelled name in the contact account no, or sometimes just a number, he wanted to update to make accountno, same as name.

He has been doing it now with the button we provided, and seems to be going well. Cant see anywhere else in JIWA where the Contact Accountno is actually used.

[Mike.Sheen]

So in fixing up incorrectly spelled name in the contact account no

There is the real problem. Using the Account No. field of the Contact Maintenance as a name field is not the intended use for this field. You have a name field, put the name in there, not the Account No. field.

These types of fields - such as the Account No. field of the Contact Maintenance - are supposed to be human-readable unique identifiers.

[SBarnes]

So in fixing up incorrectly spelled name in the contact account no

There is the real problem. Using the Account No. field of the Contact Maintenance as a name field is not the intended use for this field. You have a name field, put the name in there, not the Account No. field.

These types of fields - such as the Account No. field of the Contact Maintenance - are supposed to be human-readable unique identifiers.

You would be better off having the custom field as a lookup field and using the underlying ids and say showing the contact name which you could then change if I am reading what you are trying to create correctly.

[pricerc]

some folk really struggle with the concept of a "human-readable unique identifier"...

Had a real hard time with one customer who wanted to use their suppliers' part number as a Jiwa part number... except for the parts that didn't have a supplier part number.... and the parts with multiple suppliers...

We just said 'no' and made it an auto-number and disabled the field.

[Ernst]

So in fixing up incorrectly spelled name in the contact account no

There is the real problem. Using the Account No. field of the Contact Maintenance as a name field is not the intended use for this field. You have a name field, put the name in there, not the Account No. field.

These types of fields - such as the Account No. field of the Contact Maintenance - are supposed to be human-readable unique identifiers.

You would be better off having the custom field as a lookup field and using the underlying ids and say showing the contact name which you could then change if I am reading what you are trying to create correctly.

Yes that's a good idea, and is what we did stuart thx. We load the ID into the custom field on the sales order and display the name. But of course going into contacts, The Account No. and Name were still different.
The change button is still working well