Development

Posted by Christophe 10 May 2011 08:31 GMT-0000 posts: 31 ☆ ☆ ☆

Hi,

I'm currently considering the use of Tiki for a quite important refactoring of several applications in my company. Since I want to show results quickly, and answer customer requirements rather than develop yet another DMS/Wiki/Server, I'd like to start with ... Post management. Indeed, I got a clear requirement from a service to do that, and it could be used by other services too.

I see this as a mix of CategoryTransitions, Trackers and Permissions, but for a newbie like me, the learning curve is incredibly steep : I try to (re)read CategoryTranslations 10 times, but I can't understand how it works.

Here is a first use case I did. I'd like to get some feedback before going further.

- Clerk gets a set of incoming items, logs in Tiki, goes to a "IncomingItem" Tracker page
- Maybe it indicates how many enveloppes it will handle ?
- Each item (enveloppe, parcel, etc) gets assigned a number (ItemID), written on it.
(Note: Numbering should restart each January 1 to avoid writing long numbers, but ID needs be unique. Solution to use yyyyddddd ? (max 100,000 docs/year)
- Some tracker fields are automatically filled (date, userID, reception address, year, ...)
- Other tracker fields are filled in manually if appropriate : Sender as indicated, stamp date, DestService as indicated, DestPerson as indicated
- Category transition if forwarded to person/service without opening, checks DestPerson or DestService exists. End of process (go to next item?).
- Else clerk opens the enveloppe, category transition "Opened" with OpenedDate and OpenedBy set. The contents are extracted, redirect to another tracker "Document", that inherits some metadata from the "IncomingItem", like ReceivedDate ReceivedBy userID, ContainingItem and fills auto some metadata OpenedDate, OpenedBy, DocumentID (series each year), ...
- DocumentID stamped on physical first page
(Definition : loose pages are separate documents, stapled set is one document, clerk should staple if needed)
(Idea for later : make use of one set of small labels with IDs and "Received" + date
(Many things left for later : multiple documents (should go to an "appendix" Tracker?), content not considered as "document", making of physical copies, scanning)
- If possible, User allocates a "DocumentType" to it, such as "magazine", "bill", "letter", "wishes", "form", etc.
- If adequate and possible, user allocates a "complexe" (building managed by us) from a list (selection specific to UserID/group)
- If present, a reference back to another document is filled as metadata
- Document is physically prepared to transfer to recipient (category transition). End of process.

Does it make sense at all ? / Is this the way to go ?

Would it be a lot of work to make a mock-up of this ? (for a newbee like me)

First step I did : create categories 'Post' in root, then 'incoming' 'outgoing' 'opened' 'closed'
I'm trying now to create the trackers. Not sure it will work any direction, but could be fun.

Do you think I should upgrade to Tiki6.3 before starting ?

On a separate note, I'e seen profiles (again, incredibly cryptic for a newbie), but my server has no external access, so I can't load them. But this is probably more a question for the support forums ... while Marc directed me to this list as there may be some things not in Tiki right now.