RE: Inventory class proposal

[Dan Karwatka]

> --- Reinhard_Müller <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> > Alejandro,
> >
> > Sorry for the late response. I have some additional
> > proposals to the
> > class diagram you sent a few days ago:
> >
> > * ItemNum: varchar(12) is too short IMO. Many
> > companies I know have
> >   Item Numbers with 15 digits or more. I think
> > varchar(20) would be
> >   appropriate.
>
> Yes. It varies very much from company to company.
> Perhaps, each GNUE class should all share a common
> interface that could change it's configuration. For
> example there should be a change column length method,
> and the object should back-up, drop, recreate, and
> import automatically. This is standard in many
> "customizable" applications.

In some areas of the wholesale arena the pat numbers or item codes from
vendors or manufacturers can be up to 20 characters long this actually
translates to a 23 character long item code in our inventory system.  This
is due to our desire not to make people (our customers and sales people)
learn new item codes.  If the person knows the item code for a well known
item they just prefix it with the manufacturer code and they have our item
code.

To show that this works well for us we currently have over 3 million item
codes in our system comprised of stock and non stock.  My suggestion is that
a varchar(23) should be the minimum and that since it's varchar storage
space will not be an issue since it is trimmed before storage into the
database table.

Also it may be better to rename the column from ItemNum to ItemCode since it
is not necessarily a number.