mls wrote:Is there any reason to use Sales Quotes rather than Sales Orders (or vice versa)? Or would both work equally well to solve this problem?
Sales orders will take the stock and make it unavailable to other orders or uses - except if the sales order is a type Forward Order - sales quotes on the other hand, won't take the stock.
If you use sales orders and set it as a Forward order, then it's the same practically as quotes.
mls wrote:Are there any reasons why a request might fail? Perhaps if some of the inventory items are unavailable, or...?
Not really - if a sales order is not a forward order, and you don't have enough stock AND the item(s) are not backorderable items, then you may have a problem setting the quantity - but I'm pretty sure it just adjusts the quantity down and does not throw an exception.[/quote]
mls wrote:If we end up using this solution, we will be creating a large number of stateful objects...basically every time a customer loads a new page of product listings on the website. How likely is this to cause a problem inside Jiwa? I'm thinking we should be ok if we free up memory by abandoning the Quote/Order immediately after creating it...does that make sense?
We've actually removed stateful from the next major release of Jiwa (what will be Version 8) - I think you may now want to steer away from that as a solution.