Great improvements in label printing

Based on the work of Zikzakmedia, I extended the label printing capabilities of OpenERP. My goal was to provide quick high-volume product label printing.

The following improvements were made:
-Better usability like label language selection and default label format for every template.
-Refactoring to make it possible to easily add printing engines.
-Added a mako-RML engine to the existing mako-XSL:RML engine that has more possibilities in label design and eliminates an extra step that could be source of errors.
-Added a mako-SLCS engine to print to Bixolon label printers.
-Added an editable grid to fill in with products and label quantities to print plus a button on pickings to automatically fill in this grid from their data.

The modules that provide these functionalities:
-label: made by Zikzakmedia in stable 5.0 extra addons. Provides PDF printing with XSL:RML and RML.
-label_product in stable 5.0 extra addons
-label_slcs in stable 5.0 extra addons
-For label_slcs it is useful to install the printjob module from community addons that could send the generated commands directly to the printer. It's made by Pegueroles SCP & NaN.

base_report_unicode v1.2

The base_report_unicode module has been updated to support <b>, <i> (bold and italic) tags. OpenERP by default ignores those if used with TrueType fonts.
The DejaVu fonts are also updated to the latest versions.

Restrict access to moves, pickings and locations

I've just published a new module in community addons

This module allows filtering of pickings and stock inventories by location. It's useful to restrict stock workers to only see those pickings that are relevant to them.

Technically: pickings get their unused location_id, location_dest_id fields redefined to be filled in from their moves' data. Inventories get a location_ids field from their lines' data.

Product related price list items

I've just published a new module called product_related_pricelis_items in stable 5.0 extra addons

A convenience wizard on the product form to show and edit only the price list items that are relevant. This means that you can choose a price list version from the product form and you get an editable grid with only those items that are defined for that product or it's categories (including some parents) or aren't restricted at all.

NOTE: Needs the --enable-code-actions parameter for the server.

Customer credit limit control module

I've just published a new module in stable 5.0 extra addons

The Sale Order confirming button checks if the partner's
receivables minus payables plus the order's total
exceeds her credit limit.
If it does, it doesn't let the user to confirm the order.
Managers have an extra button to bypass the check but
of course the credit limit itself could be lifted, too.

System backup tool for OpenERP

I've just published a new module in community addons

This is a system backup tool that can be run from the OpenERP
user interface. It is meant for system administrators.
It doesn't do the backup itself but provides a convenient
framework to run python backup scripts. There are several
example scripts provided that can be run outside OpenERP
so they can be easily tested.
Backup scripts are called Tasks and they don't do device
mounting and unmounting but that's provided by the scripts
in the object Target.
The result of a backup operation is called a Job. There are
tar and rsync kind of jobs supported.

base_report_unicode v1.1

The base_report_unicode module has been updated to work with the new report engine that's in v5.0 for some weeks now. The module has been moved to trunk-extra-addons from the community-addons.

Update: This module is now in the 5.0-extra branch.

New module: base_report_unicode

The final solution to the unicode printing problem many times mentioned in this blog! Simply install this module and your reports will have the truetype fonts needed. That's all, no patching, no tinkering with reportlab and the fonts:)
I've uploaded this module to the community addons mentioned in the previous post.

Where are the modules?

Just a reminder how the OpenObject module repositories are set up.
There are 3 categories with 3 levels of code quality review requirements:
The stable 5.0 official addons
The development official addons
are the modules bundled with OpenERP and these represent the core functionality. The OpenERP Quality Team is responsible.
The stable 5.0 extra addons
The development extra addons
is a large collection (~300) of modules from many contributors. They are usually of good quality but the strict review process is not needed. Members of the OpenERP Commiters team can upload here. OpenERP Commiters are more experienced users & developers.
The community addons
is a new repository. This is going to be a repository where everyone can upload his/her modules if he wants to make it publicly available. The OpenERP Community team is open to everyone.

New module: product_price_update

I have rewritten the extra-addons/product_listprice_upgrade module, it can be downloaded with 'bzr branch lp:~gdukai/openobject-addons/product_price_update'.

It has several improvements over the original:
-Possible to update any price type not just the list price.
-Correctly uses recursion and checks to update a price only one time even if parent and child categories are selected.
-Rewritten using the new osv_memory objects (the old module used wizard.interface).
-Corrects a menu duplication.

If you don't know what it is for, read my previous post. This module could also be interesting to see how the old type wizard looks like reimplemented in osv_memory.

Better price control

The basic setup of OpenERP has a very simple pricelist setup: manually set the list prices of the products and use them for the sales orders. Many companies use a cost price + margin% = list price formula. To work like this, we could easly modify the default public pricelist (sales pricelist) to be based on the cost price and add some percentage to that.
But this is usually not enough, for two reasons:

• The prices calculated by the sales pricelist can only be seen when creating new sales order lines. Nothing updates the list price field on the products.
• The sales prices change with every purchase because it changes the cost price they are based on. Many companies don't want to change prices every hour or so.

The solution: use the product_listprice_upgrade module in extra-addons. We need the original public pricelist that is based on the list price. Plus we have to create a new one of the type 'internal' and set it up to be based on the cost price + margin formula. The wizard in the listprice_upgrade module under the Pricelist menu will update the list price for the products we choose. This has to be run every time we decide to have new list prices.

p.s. There's a better module than product_listprice_upgrade, read this post.