[GNC] Deleting customer

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

On Mon, July 11, 2022 12:57 pm, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 09:29:49AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> You can't.
>> Just change it and reuse it for another customer.
>
> Incidentally, in the past I found myself manually editing the .xml and
> carefully deleted the gnc:GncCustomer object (and looked up the whole
> file for the relevant cust:guid code to check if there were references).
>
> Nothing bad came from it after several months, so I suspect I did it
> properly and didn't break anything in it…
>
>
> But this left me wondering: is this (and the same for vendors and
> invoices/bills) just a lacking feature that nobody implemented, or a
> design decision?
> It doesn't strike me as something incredibly hard to implement (just
> check if there is any reference (which IIRC can only be in
> bills/invoices objects) before deleting), but perhaps I'm missing
> something big in this topic.

It was a design decision.  There are lots of places where there could be
hidden references, and some of the references could be in the *other*
direction, too.

There are possibly other references than just invoices.  There can be
indirect references.  And there can be references into the CoA as well,
through the Lots function -- a prepayment will reference a customer, even
if you don't have any invoices.

Finding whether or not a customer is referenced was just deemed to be too
much work for something that just doesn't happen much.  So it was decided
that it was sufficient to either re-use the Customer object for a new
customer, or mark it Inactive so it didn't show up in searches.

Thanks,

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant