Odoo Addons (MOVED TO GITHUB)

Bug #709201
Comment #8

Comment 8 for bug 709201

Revision history for this message

Olivier Dony (Odoo) (odo-openerp) wrote on 2011-02-21:

Everyone, please calm down, here is the rationale:

It is a convention in OpenERP that all objects that are likely to be linked via a many2one relationship should have a 'name' (or _rec_name) column. For res.currency, we used to have "name", "code", and "symbol". The result was that in many cases, name was equal to code, and any module that needed to refer to a currency had to choose which one to take.. and they did not all pick the same one. But how many different fields do we actually need to describe a currency?
As the bug description is saying, the only way of referring to a unique currency is to use the ISO code. We wanted to avoid the confusion (the "name" was only used as label when selecting a currency) so in v6 the "code" field has been removed, and "name" is now meant to hold the code, while "symbol" is still used to hold the short currency representation to be used in print, usually the currency sign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign).
For example: name="USD", symbol="$" - which should be sufficient for most purposes. This is similar to sale.order's name which is the SO sequence number - the main unique reference to it.

So basically, as part of the migration to v6, modules that used to depend on the "code" of res.currency should now reference the name instead (and those using the name can just stay as they were). If this is what was done for c2c_currency_rate_update, then it's correct.

Therefore this bug should in fact be closed, unless you truly believe that a third field is really needed for describing a currency in OpenERP's core. Maybe we should also convert this bug to a FAQ if you think this is going to confuse many module authors...

PS: we will add a help/tooltip on the "name" field to indicate that it's really meant to hold the code, and double-check all currencies that are shipped with OpenERP to make sure the name really is the ISO code (as not 100% of the currencies had name==code, some codes need to be restored properly).

Everyone, please calm down, here is the rationale:

It is a convention in OpenERP that all objects that are likely to be linked via a many2one relationship should have a 'name' (or _rec_name) column. For res.currency, we used to have "name", "code", and "symbol".  The result was that in many cases, name was equal to code, and any module that needed to refer to a currency had to choose which one to take.. and they did not all pick the same one. But how many different fields do we actually need to describe a currency?
As the bug description is saying, the only way of referring to a unique currency is to use the ISO code. We wanted to avoid the confusion (the "name" was only used as label when selecting a currency) so in v6 the "code" field has been removed, and "name" is now meant to hold the code, while "symbol" is still used to hold the short currency representation to be used in print, usually the currency sign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign). 
For example: name="USD", symbol="$" - which should be sufficient for most purposes. This is similar to sale.order's name which is the SO sequence number - the main unique reference to it.

So basically, as part of the migration to v6, modules that used to depend on the "code"  of res.currency should now reference the name instead (and those using the name can just stay as they were). If this is what was done for c2c_currency_rate_update, then it's correct.