Compiere from the Source

Cost Center, Profit Center, Service Center in Compiere

Traditionally, Cost Centers were used to allocate costs to different parts of the organization. The newer concepts of Profit Centers also include the revenue side. Service Centers extend this concept sometimes giving internal organizations the option to aquire services internally or externally - so a Service Center could actually external as outsourced.

Compiere provides a variety of options to model these concepts. At the center is the Organization entity. In Compiere, you can create unlimited organizational entities. You can define and differentiate different types of organization (Division, Store, Legal Entity, ...) and maintain multiple organizational hierarchies (ownership, logistics, reporting, ...).  Organizations can be linked to (external) Business Partners for easier management of legal entities as well for outsourced service organizations.

Compiere Deployment on JBoss, Tomcat, OAS and WAS

Compiere is designed to support generic J2EE Application server, but as usual, there are some detail considerations.  Out of the box, Compiere supports JBoss and manages it's configuration and deployment.  In addition to JBoss, you can deploy the full application server to IBM WebSphere (WAS), Oracle Application Server (OAS) and others in addition to deploying the web containers in Tomcat.

In the setup dialog, you have the choice of "jboss", "tomcatOnly" and "ibmWAS" (the "oracleAS" option is disabled at the moment).  In this blog, I will describe how best to implement the different options.

Let's start with stand alone Tomcat. You can deploy war (WebArchive) files to Tomcat, examples are the web store, the web user interface.  You may do that for performance reasons and you always need another application server for the full functionality.  When selecting Tomcat in the Compiere Setup, you need to provide a path to your Tomcat deployment directory.  When starting Tomcat, you need to make sure that you add the Compiere Home variable to the Tomcat start command
(example: -DCOMPIERE_HOME=C:\Compiere2)
and you must configure the port to listen on.  I suggest that you rename the war file as the context provided is the exact name of the war file.

Using Lists in Compiere

Compiere is designed to allow for easy customization and extension.  Often these changes will include adding new field to existing tables.

You can allow users total freedom in the data entry process (text field), provide them with a list that users can modify (table) or control the list (reference).  Which is the best option will depend upon how the field is used.

For example, you may want to add a field that displays the type of Business Partner in the Business Partner window.  Adding the field BPartnerType to the Business Partner window is a simple task that has been described in earlier blog entries.  What we will discuss here is the different options for how the field is populated.