OSS Solutions

Following up on our permanent quest to harness the power of OpenERP, this article will consider the specific challenge of building a chart of accounts. One of the most difficult things in OpenERP when customising it for a specific country is defining the chart of accounts.

This installation procedure is valid for the development version of OpenERP 5.0.0 (December 2008)

$> mkdir ~/openerp/unstable/5.0 -p $> cd ~/openerp/unstable/5.0 $> bzr clone lp:~openerp/openobject-server/trunk server $> bzr clone lp:~openerp/openobject-client/trunk client $> bzr clone lp:~openerp/openobject-addons/trunk addons $> bzr clone lp:~openerp/openobject-client-web/trunk client-web $> cd server/bin/addons $> ln -s ../../../addons/* .

Starting the server can then be done like this:

cd .. ./tinyerp-server.py –db_port=5432

If you ever installed Python's eTiny module for OpenERP, you might want to remove it to install another version. In this case, the solution is to delete the eTiny module's directory (in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages for example).

cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ rm -r eTiny-1.0.1.1-py2.4.egg/ vim easy-install.pth

and remove the line importing the eTiny module.

While trying to debug WebCalendar 1.2.0 a little, combined with iCal and using French, we found a series of things that might be worth reporting in one go... First of all, some weird warning messages appear reporting that mb_language() did not understand "French" as a supported language. Basically, the php documentation on mb_language() is quite clear: this function only supports "Japanese", "ja", "English", "en" and "uni" as languages, and is mostly used in the context of e-mails to translate fonts from one language to another.

Here is a non-exhaustive (73 so far) list of some Free Software projects which we contributed [1] to:

• apt-proxy
• Asterisk
• Auto Nice Daemon (AND)
• AWstats
• Bacula
• BNPanel
• Cedar Backup
• Chamilo
• Claroline
• COnfigurator for GNOME (COG)
• Crystal Space
• DCL
• Debian / Debian Education / Debian-Edu
• Debian-Installer
• Dokeos

eTiny (OpenERP's web server) shows default header images and style that might not really suit your needs. [caption id="attachment_396" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="OpenERP with default style"]

I recently learnt that eTiny, OpenERP's web server, is actually caching pages when in "production" mode (this mode can be changed in the configuration file which is /etc/etiny-server.cfg if you followed the documentation here). This means that installing some modules may not have a direct visual effect if you have already seen a page before altering it with the module installation. To avoid caching, you can either change the eTiny server mode in /etc/etiny-server.c

Following an internal meeting at BeezNest, we decided to officially provide services for OpenERP before the end of the year, through an official partnership with Tiny SPRL, the company behind the product. We found a lot of little bugs and usability problems, and submitted our first bug report following the little comment by Stéphane Wirtel, one of our acquaintances (through other channels than OpenERP) and an official employee of Tiny SPRL (as a developer of OpenERP). However, and although we found these bugs and usability problems

When trying to encode new hours in one's timesheet in OpenERP, the following error might appear:

ERROR:  null value in column "journal_id" violates not-null constraint insert into "account_analytic_line" (id,perm_id,"user_id","account_id","general_account_id","product_uom_id","journal_id","name","to_invoice","amount","unit_amount","date","product_id",create_uid,create_date) values (4,NULL,'4','6','634','4',NULL,'Analysis of AIM development project',NULL,-40.000000,2.000000,'2008-08-14','1',4,now())

The error code is not clear, but the problem in this case comes from t