[freeside-devel] Freeside draft checks scheme changes

Dave Burgess burgess at neonramp.com
Thu Nov 15 15:01:46 PST 2001


>On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 10:45:36AM -0600, Jeff Foster wrote:
>>
>> From: ivan [mailto:ivan at 420.am]
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 10:37 AM
>>
>> > Use the `payinfo' field for the routing number and account number,
or
>> > convince me why that's not appropriate.
>>
>> Thought of that and started that way first. I would join the
>> routing number and account number with a ':' separater. But I
>> didn't want to make too much work for myself and thought that
>> just adding the new fields would be easier.
>
>Schema changes are a pain and I probably tend toward minimizing them
when
>possible.  I don't think I'm convinced that it's any significant extra
>work to just put them in the payinfo field; it's not called
"cardnumber"
>for a reason.

While I respectfully disagree that adding a field in the schema is any
kind of huge problem (especially one that's optional) I agree with you
that this is a logical extension of the payinfo field.  Changing the
size of a field isn't a problem for MySQL (within limits, of course).
In this case, increasing the size of the payinfo field to accomodate the
routing and account number, separated by a period shouldn't hurt anyone
too badly.

>
>> > I could maybe see adding the `checknum' field.  Tell me more about
how
>> > it's supposed to work; does the customer give you a check number in
some
>> > starting range and you incremement it by one each time or what?
>>
>> Yes that is correct. When the billing is done the current check
>> number is sent to the billing program, the value is incremented,
>> and the cust_main entry is updated.
>
>Okay.  How about an integer instead of a varchar?

Is there anything else that we can use this field for?  Many of the
check-by-phone systems I'm familiar with actually ask the customer to
assign a block of one or more numbers, which this scheme doesn't really
address very well.  If we make the field a varchar and have it default
to a start:end list, it might serve some other duty for another billing
method later... When the last number has been used, clear the field and
put up a reminder that tells the account rep to call for more check
numbers.  If there is no entry in the field, flag the account as a
problem and do something.  Of course, I'm not hard over about it-I'm
just trying to spark a little debate.

Dave




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