Mailing List Archive: Inventory adjustment questions

Inventory adjustment questions

Jan 2, 2001, 3:05 AM

Post #1 of 5 (1405 views)

Hiya,

I'm a new IC user. I've got IC 4.6.1 installed on RH7, Perl 5.6.0, MySQL
3.22.32, DBD::mysql.

The construct demo seems to work dandy, but I ran into three issues that
I'd like to ask about:

1. As a 'customer,' I used the Stock Alerting function with the
out-of-stock Mini-Sledge. As promised, I received an email telling me I'd
be notified when the item came in stock. So then I added stock to the
Mini-Sledge. However, I received no email saying the Mini-Sledge was now
in stock. Is there something I need to setup or admin to make this happen?

2. When I added stock to the Mini-Sledge on the "Inventory: edit item"
page, although the change was applied correctly, the following page gave
me this error at the top:

Sorry, there was an error in processing this form action. Please report
the error or try again later. (You have an error in your SQL syntax near
'= NULL where sku = 'os28073' ' at line 1 )

Now, as I said it did apply the change. Even just hitting "OK" at the
Inventory: edit item page without changing any values produced the error.

3. Whenever IC needs to send an email to a customer, there is an
extremely long wait. I believe this may be because of DNS issues on my
machine. I'd like to use an external SMTP server, but I can't find where
to specify it. I apologize if this is in the docs -- I looked but
couldn't find anything.

Thanks!

Steve Freitas

Inventory adjustment questions [ In reply to ]

doug at lathi

Jan 2, 2001, 1:15 PM

Post #2 of 5 (1387 views)

Permalink

Steve Freitas <sflist@ihonk.com> writes:

> 1. As a 'customer,' I used the Stock Alerting function with the
> out-of-stock Mini-Sledge. As promised, I received an email telling
> me I'd be notified when the item came in stock. So then I added
> stock to the Mini-Sledge. However, I received no email saying the
> Mini-Sledge was now in stock. Is there something I need to setup or
> admin to make this happen?

There isn't really any code to handle this. You can search the
archives on in-stock or something. I have developed something that is
fairly rudimentary. As soon as I can, I will post a link to a patch
for the construct demo.

> 3. Whenever IC needs to send an email to a customer, there is an
> extremely long wait. I believe this may be because of DNS issues on
> my machine. I'd like to use an external SMTP server, but I can't
> find where to specify it. I apologize if this is in the docs -- I
> looked but couldn't find anything.

IC relies on whatever mail configuration your server itself has. If
you want your server to use a "smarthost" you will need to configure
your Mail Transport Agent (MTA - sendmail, qmail, etc.) to do that.

--
(__) Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1 61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
|_/ If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.

Inventory adjustment questions [ In reply to ]

sflist at ihonk

Jan 2, 2001, 11:37 PM

Post #3 of 5 (1391 views)

Permalink

>There isn't really any code to handle this. You can search the
>archives on in-stock or something. I have developed something that is
>fairly rudimentary. As soon as I can, I will post a link to a patch
>for the construct demo.

Great, thanks! I think Akopia should add this function to its todo list
-- incomplete functions are almost as bad as bugs.

>IC relies on whatever mail configuration your server itself has. If
>you want your server to use a "smarthost" you will need to configure
>your Mail Transport Agent (MTA - sendmail, qmail, etc.) to do that.

I apologize for responding with what should be a Linux sysadmin question,
but my impression has been that applications usually have some setting
for this -- otherwise, how would it know whether to use /usr/bin/sendmail
or /usr/local/bin/qmail? Is there some global setting buried in /etc
which tells apps which MTA to use by default?

Thanks!

Steve Freitas

Inventory adjustment questions [ In reply to ]

doug at lathi

Jan 3, 2001, 8:42 AM

Post #4 of 5 (1397 views)

Permalink

Steve Freitas <sflist@ihonk.com> writes:

> >There isn't really any code to handle this. You can search the
> >archives on in-stock or something. I have developed something that is
> >fairly rudimentary. As soon as I can, I will post a link to a patch
> >for the construct demo.
>
> Great, thanks! I think Akopia should add this function to its todo list
> -- incomplete functions are almost as bad as bugs.

If you look in the archives, you'll see Mike only added what he did
under protest. He has valid concerns about how to keep the inventory
levels accurate. IC is catalog software. Inventory control is a
whole other issue that he doesn't want to breach.

> how would it know whether to use /usr/bin/sendmail or
> /usr/local/bin/qmail?

The MTA is always up and running as a daemon. By the nature of MTAs,
you can only have one running at a time. So, when an application
wants to send mail it connects to the running MTA through a well known
interface. The MTA is started up usually at boot time. Depending on
your box, the bootup scripts are either located in /etc,
/etc/rc.d/init.d, or just /etc/init.d.
--
(__) Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1 61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
|_/ If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.

Inventory adjustment questions [ In reply to ]

racke at linuxia

Jan 3, 2001, 8:57 AM

Post #5 of 5 (1392 views)

Permalink

Doug Alcorn <doug@lathi.net> writes:

> Steve Freitas <sflist@ihonk.com> writes:
>
> > >There isn't really any code to handle this. You can search the
> > >archives on in-stock or something. I have developed something that is
> > >fairly rudimentary. As soon as I can, I will post a link to a patch
> > >for the construct demo.
> >
> > Great, thanks! I think Akopia should add this function to its todo list
> > -- incomplete functions are almost as bad as bugs.
>
> If you look in the archives, you'll see Mike only added what he did
> under protest. He has valid concerns about how to keep the inventory
> levels accurate. IC is catalog software. Inventory control is a
> whole other issue that he doesn't want to breach.
>
> > how would it know whether to use /usr/bin/sendmail or
> > /usr/local/bin/qmail?
>
> The MTA is always up and running as a daemon. By the nature of MTAs,
> you can only have one running at a time. So, when an application
> wants to send mail it connects to the running MTA through a well known
> interface. The MTA is started up usually at boot time. Depending on
> your box, the bootup scripts are either located in /etc,
> /etc/rc.d/init.d, or just /etc/init.d.

No, this is not right. MTAs can as well run from inetd.conf.
On a nice Linux system, you should have a link pointing to
a sendmail wrapper, even if you use exim,qmail or whatever,
usually /usr/sbin/sendmail.

Ciao
Racke

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