No quotation, invoice or sales order could be raised at all

Yesterday we closed a hole in branch access: documents were never recording which branch they belonged to, so a restriction meant to narrow what a person could see matched nothing and therefore hid nothing. The fix was to work the branch out on the server when a document is created.

Numbering is branch-aware too: a series belongs to a document type and a branch. But every series the product creates is made for the business as a whole, with no branch, and there is no screen that makes one for a branch. So the moment a branch started being filled in, the lookup found nothing, a brand-new counter was opened at 1, and the first number it produced was one you had issued a year ago.

The database refuses two live documents with the same number, which is the rule doing its job. And because the save was rejected, the new counter was rolled back with it, so the next attempt started at 1 again, and the next.

With numbering fixed, a new quotation saved, and then would not save again. Opening any document, changing nothing and pressing Save answered “please check the highlighted fields” with nothing highlighted, because the field it objected to is not on the screen.

The editor loads a document and sends the whole thing back when you save, so every stored value has to be acceptable on the way in. Two were not: a pair of GST flags that no screen sets, and which are therefore empty on every document ever raised. The schema accepted “not sent” and refused “empty”, which are the same thing to anybody using the product.

This one is not new. It has been there for as long as those columns have, on every document type: quotation, order, invoice, proforma, credit note, challan, purchase order and bill. Both are fixed, and a test now checks every nullable column on a document against what the save will accept, for both the sales and the purchase copies of that schema.