O think several cases are related to the leak of documentations o both
sides community and fabien's team.

One thing is important to understand, technically speaking Imho have the
same table_ model_ (correctly segmented even I  postgres side) with all
entities  (users, partners, contacts, and so on) is not the problem.

The main issue is consider that in  legal documents  you continue afirming
it is a related field and not a saved field.

Btw.

I am now in an important meeting wit one of our biggest (OPW) Customers
showing the case and the impact in the migration and proccess, I think
resume all the business cases here presented v6.1 vs v7.0 and Fabien giving
us a feedback over all the spectrum should help everybody "What do you
think?".

IOH.

BTW.... In terms of migration @Fabien where will be recorded in our
databases the invoice address on all business documents?

Thank for all the effort ..... But no thanks for the headache ;-)


Written from my android
On Apr 10, 2013 3:46 PM, "Stéphane Bidoul (Acsone)" <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Don't you think that in the end, this is more a backward compatibility
> issue than a data model correctness issue?
>
> Whatever the way we look at it, it is undeniable that 7.0 has changed
> the semantics of the partner_id field on business documents. And that
> has deep impacts everywhere.
>
> Many good reasons for the change have been explained, but semantics
> changes must be made explicit by changing names. If this field had
> received any other name than partner_id (party_id, whatever), it would
> have been much easier to preserve backward compatibility to a great
> extend by (re)introducing partner_id as a read-only field.
>
> IMHO, given the huge impact of this semantics change in community
> modules (and certified modules alike), preserving backward compatibility
> is totally worth an exception to the stable schema policy.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to OpenERP
> Project Group.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1160365
>
> Title:
>   [7.0] incorrect handling of contact/companies for invoicing and
>   related purposes
>
> Status in OpenERP Addons (modules):
>   In Progress
> Status in OpenERP Server:
>   In Progress
>
> Bug description:
>   == Problem Description ==
>
>   This issue is an attempt to formalize the various problems detected
>   with the res.partner refactoring that took place in OpenERP 7.0. Some
>   of the issues have already been discussed on bug 1151947, bug 1155679
>   and on help.openerp.com.
>
>   The main problems identified so far:
>
>   1) When a simple contact (type=contact) is selected as the reference
>   party for creating a business document (such as the customer on a
>   Sales Order), a proper invoicing partner (if any) should be selected
>   among the descendants of the "commercial party" to which the contact
>   belongs, instead of the contact itself.
>
>   2) Even when a simple contact is used as the invoicing partner for a
>   business operation (e.g. manually selected by the user as the invoice
>   address on a SO), all invoicing/accounting-related master data must be
>   taken from the relevant "commercial party" for that contact. This will
>   usually be the parent company.
>
>   3) When editing contacts/addresses, it is currently possible to view
>   and edit accounting/invoicing related data, while it should be clear
>   that this data is coming from the "related commercial party", usually
>   the parent company.
>
>   4) When searching though business documents for a company name, the
>   entries that were issued for one of the company's contacts/addresses
>   should be found as well.
>
>   5) It has been reported that in some countries it is not permitted to
>   issue invoicing documents for a contact, so the name of a relevant
>   invoicing must be used instead (Financial Department or parent
>   Company).
>
>   6) In "Analysis" reporting views, result that are grouped by partner
>   will not be automatically aggregated at company level.
>
>   == Proposed Solution==
>
>   The rationale for the proposed solution is based on the following points:
>   - We think the 7.0 partner model is appropriate and should not be
> considered the cause for these functional/usability problems
>   - We think the solution should be mostly handled by the res.partner
> model itself, so that it fixes most modules automatically.
>   - We think that in many cases, using a contact/address is the right
> level of granularity, and any reporting based on that is fundamentally
> correct. Invoicing/Accounting is specific for the reasons mentioned above,
> and automatically selecting the proper entity to use should make reporting
> provide the expected result.
>
>   Based on this, we propose the following solution. Parts A & B are
>   meant to solve the issue of using the right invoicing/accounting data
>   at all times (issues 2 & 3 mainly), while parts C, D & E  are meant to
>   improve the selection of invoicing entities and the related reporting
>   (issues 1, 4, 5 & 6):
>
>   A) Let the "commercial party" for a partner be the person or company
>   that is used as reference for all invoicing/accounting matters. The
>   "commercial party" is computed as: the first parent that is marked as
>   a company (is_company is checked) or is the root of the hierarchy if
>   there is no company. It can be the partner itself if it's a company or
>   if it has no parent.
>
>   B) The relevant invoicing/accounting data will only be editable on an
> "commercial party", and all contacts/addresses that are descendants of an
> "commercial party" will inherit those settings. This will be done as
> follows:
>   - when a partner is not an commercial party, the form view will be
> modified: the Accounting tab and the Invoicing section of the
> Sales&Purchases tab will be replaced by a note that says something like
> "Invoicing settings are controlled on <link to commercial party>".
>   - when writing() on a partner that is an commercial party, all the
> values of invoicing/accounting-related fields will be automatically copied
> to all descendants that are not commercial party themselves (e.g.
> pricelist, G/L accounts, payment terms, etc.). The list of fields to copy
> will be returned by a method on res.partner that can be overridden in other
> modules.
>   - when changing the parent of a partner causes a change of "commercial
> party", the same fields will be copied
>
>   C) When a contact/address is selected as the reference for a business
> document (SO/PO), the system should automatically select appropriate
> invoicing and delivery parties from the relevant "commercial party".  This
> is the responsibility of the res.partner.address_get() method (legacy name
> for backwards-compatibility), and it must be adapted for the new model.
>   The new algorithm should search in the whole hierarchy of the partner,
> stopping at the parent "commercial party", as defined in A. This will be
> used automatically by the on_change triggers on SO/PO/etc, and should
> ensure that the proper invoicing and delivery partners are always selected.
>
>   D) The res.partner.address_get() method considers the partner type
> "default" as a wildcard, so any partner with type "default" is seen as a
> match for any requested type. This is correct but unfortunately "default"
> is the default value, which would stop the lookup described in C at the
> first step. The "default type" for a partner will be changed to "contact",
> so that unless otherwise specified a simple contact cannot be used as
> "invoicing partner" or "delivery partner", unless it is itself a
> "commercial party".
>   Note: even if a simple contact has type "default" or "invoicing", the
> accounting/invoicing settings would still come from the relevant
> "commercial party". It will simply be seen as a possible choice for the
> "invoice partner"  (e.g. the partner_invoice_id field on a SO)
>
>   E) The search view of the main business documents will use the
>   "child_of" operator when matching contacts/partners. For example all
>   invoices issued to any contact from Agrolait will be found when
>   searching for "Partner: Agrolait".
>
>   UPDATE:
>   F) (Already implemented in 7.0) When booking journal entries for any
> partner, the system always links them to the "commercial party" related to
> the partner (the first parent company or root partner). This makes sure
> that reporting and reconciling Journal entries will always work properly.
>
>
>   == How does the solution solve the issues ==
>
>   Let's address the issues one by one:
>
>   1) When selecting a contact as the Customer for a Sales Order, a
>   proper "invoice address" and "delivery address" will now be
>   automatically selected, thanks to C & D.
>
>   2) Any code in business modules that deals with invoicing/accounting
>   related data should automatically use the data of the "commercial
>   party", thanks to B, because the data should always be in sync.
>
>   3) Directly addressed by B.
>
>   4) Directly addressed by E.
>
>   5) Thanks to C & D, an appropriate "invoicing partner" should always
>   be automatically set on SO/PO, in B2C and in B2B cases. So if you want
>   "Agrolait" to be displayed on all invoices that corresponds to SOs
>   issued for "Sylvie Lelitre (Agrolait)", just make sure that "Sylvie
>   Lelite" does not have "invoice" or "default" type, but has type
>   "contact" instead (which will be the default).
>
>   6) Due to the previous points (especially 5), an appropriate invoicing
>   partner should always be selected on all invoices, regardless of who
>   what the contact to which the SO/PO was issued. This will make
>   reporting behave as expected in most cases. There will be cases where
>   the contact granularity appears (e.g when grouping Sales Orders on
>   Customer), but this expected and correct. In general the same contact
>   will appear for most documents related to the same commercial party.
>
>   For all other case, such as domains, contexts, etc., contacts should
>   be a valid level of granularity, keeping in mind the major use cases:
>   B2B with 2 levels of hierarchy: company and contacts, and B2C with 1
>   level (normal case) or 2 levels of hierarchy (ecommerce/webshops with
>   multiple addresses for each customer)
>
>   == Further refinements ==
>
>   In trunk some extra things could be planned to further improve some
> aspects, such as:
>   - the "commercial party" field could become a stored function field on
> res.partner, so that it becomes very easy to add related fields on any
> document - making reporting per company even easier.
>   - other suggestions welcome
>
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