Information Systems:IN-NAMECHG - Business Partners

Business Partners in Infonet consists of the following programs to display and manage uniPHARM business partners (customers, shareholders, suppliers etc.):

• IN_NAMECHG.PGM
• IN_NAMEADD.PGM
• IN_NAMEDSP.PGM
• IN_NAMELST.PGM

Although green screen processes could still be used to add/change partners in ASW, the correlating programs in Infonet are the de facto standard methods for performing these tasks.

Technical information

We are testing BitBucket for documentation of the actual programming, so that will not be included here (or in correlating areas of other pages dedicated to individual Infonet programs)-norwizzle (talk)

General flow of 'Add Partner' and limitations

IN_NAMEADD is called by submitting the form (e.g. clicking 'Add partner') at the top of the main Business Partners page (IN_NAMELST.PGM). This form has only two selectable parameters: customer type and account type. The program then redirects to IN_NAMECHG (Work with Partner Information), which is what presents the user with a form to complete setup. Herein lies a catch-22 and is a huge flaw in program design: because the same program is being called to both add and change partners, without having entered any information yet during 'add partner' (except customer and account types), records must already exist at this point for the program to be able to change them. Doing it this way forces the creation of preliminary records, which is exactly what is being done by IN_NAMEADD.

Recommendations for future redesign

Moved here.