Misc enhancements in september

Although it's been more than a month since our last post, that doesn't mean development has stalled.

Koo is more stable than ever and in really good shape (in fact many production environments could be using it already), but we want to make 5.0 a release as good as possible and we're not in a hurry by now. Meanwhile everyone is encouraged to download and test it!

It seems our jasper_reports module is also gaining some momentum, judging on feedback and questions on the forums. We hope this will eventually help us add features exposed in previous posts.

Lately we've been working in several areas. These include bugfixes and security advisories to OpenObject server and modules, the addition of new modules in extra-addons, such as those of risk and insurance risk management or another one that allows creating a product composed of several other products. Their names start with "nan_" so they're pretty easy to find, but note we're not using them in production environments yet, so some issues may still arise.

Other bugfixes and enhancements have gone into the openerp-spain project repository. It seems the community is being quite active and it's nice to see discussions in several areas. We think the "discuss & develop" as opposed to the "develop & try to convince somebody to merge my stuff" is really helping on the quality of the new modules.

We've also added a couple of simple yet interesting features to Koo, to which we try not to add large new features, but we must add some customer requests. One of them adds the "--enter-as-tab" parameter to koo, which makes it possible to jump from one field to another using Enter or Return keys. The other one makes it possible to use a barcode scanner connected to the serial port. It simply forwards input from the reader to the application as key presses, so it's available anywhere in the application. So all those looking for a powerful POS for OpenERP, Koo is another step closer.

Update

I forgot to mention the enhancements we did to the printjob module available in the community repository, which was started by Pegueroles, S.C.P. We've extended their excellent work and the module now features:

• All reports are stored in a spool. After a couple of days they are automatically removed except for reports marked to persist. Reports in the spool can then be sent to the client or to a preconfigured printer at any time.
• Reports can be sent to the client (OpenERP's default), directly to a printer, or only to the spool.
• These three options are configurable in system-wide settings, per user, per report, and per user and report. This allows setting the default behaviour to "send to client", while configuring a specific user to send all documents to a particular printer.
• Printers can be configured in the module (a CUPS server is expected).

This module is really useful in many scenarios and, once again, especially interesting for POS environments.