Hi

Once a workorder is closed, it is available for historical viewing only and can not be edited to prevent editing of historical information.

At this time, if a workorder has been closed when it was not supposed to, and the workorder status can not be left in its selected state, than yes, you would have to restore from before that workorder was closed.

- Joyce

AyaNova Sales & Technical Support

http://www.ayanova.com

I have mine setup for SQL db. Using SQL Server Enterprise Manager, I browsed the WORKORDER table and saw two fields called ACLOSED and ASERVICECOMPLETED. I don't want to test on my live data so I will ask instead. If my coordinator accidently closes and/or completes the workorder via the checkboxes I should be able to access the table and change those values back to 0. Do you see any problem with this as I don't know if any other field across the tables in the db are affected when an order is closed for good?

Until the software allows admin access to change the status back through the front end, this seems like the only viable course of action in case this happens or if someone forgets to enter all info, etc. before closing up for good.

Thanks,
Dan

The long answer:

While it's not safe to ever modify anything in the database manually,  bypassing the the business object library, the workorder closed just happens to be about at the top of the list of most dangerous things to manually change.

AyaNova not only does a *lot* of processing on many other objects in the database when the status of those fields changes, it absolutely relies on the fact that a closed workorder will never become an open work order again.

When a work order is set to closed and saved it checks dozens of other properties on related objects and within the work order itself to ensure it's valid and safe to be closed.

If those checks pass it then sets off a chain of events that are irrevocable: It modifies every child and grandchild object in a workorder (i.e. workorder items, every item under workorder items).  It updates the Client and Unit objects with the correct links to the last workorder that they were serviced on.  It processes all manner of notification events related to workorder close by dates, outside service items, etc etc.

So the problem boils down to this: you unclose and un-service completed a workorder through the database.  Now you have a work order you can open and edit, but all the other objects that rely on it were processed already as it was originally closed and service completed.  You enter in new data into it and that data is related to objects that have already had their closed and service completed processing done.  Everything becomes a mess at this point and the worst kind of mess, the not immediately obvious kind of mess.

Once a work order is closed it's closed permanently.  Any attempt to circumvent this will break all sorts of things that you might not realize are related to that work order.  

The only safe way to modify data in the AyaNova database is through the business objects themselves either with a program of your own or with the AyaNova user interface or utilities.  This will not solve your problem though which is that the business objects deliberatly do not allow a work order to be re-opened for the reasons above.

While it might be tempting and in the short term it will appear to work you will run into all sorts of trouble down the road with other features completely broken by this.

It's important that your staff understand the significance of closing a work order (heeding the warning message that displays and says that it's irrevocable and permanent) and if they are not able to do that then you might want to consider removing certain rights to ensure that only a manager can close a work order.

I know it's very tempting to make changes in the data if you come from a database background and can clearly see it there, in fact we seriously considered the idea of encrypting or checksumming every record in the database just to detect manual changes but decided it would hurt performance too much so we're relying on people to heed our warnings on this.

It's not because we're control freaks, it's because all the safety of the data is handled in the business object library.  The database has no logic in it for ensuring the safety of the data, it's just too complex to be handled at that level.  All the objects are interrelated to a high degree.

Sorry to go on so much about this  but I get very worried when I see this stuff because I know how badly it will break AyaNova and I can't imagine how we would ever sort it out again short of restoring from a backup.  The problem is that you might not notice the problem until a critical time months later and a lot of data could be lost.

As per John's reply above, we have looked further into the ability to have the AyaNova Adminstrator re-open a closed workorder, but it is not feasible due to all the aspects of the database that are affected.

What we do have on our future feature list is to include:

1. Include a right specifically to the Closed field in a service workorder via the security group a user belongs to. This way depending on the security group a user belongs to, either the Closed checkmark field will be grayed out but viewable, or it would be editable. (EDIT: this feature is now provided in AyaNova 3)

2. Include Global Settings default to change the Workorder Status to a set status when the workorder is checkmarked Closed. This way, when a workorder is set to closed, it will automatically set the Workorder Status as stated in the Global Settings. (EDIT: this feature will be in future release AyaNova 4)

- Joyce

AyaNova Sales & Technical Support

http://www.ayanova.com

Thanks!

You would need to edit the workorders in AyaNova CE to <In Progress> prior to importing into AyaNova v3.

All workorders in AyaNova CE that are presently select to <Closed> are checkmarked Closed in AyaNova v3 when imported. Workorders set to <Closed> in AyaNova v3 are for historical viewing - they can no longer be edited.

As outlined in the manual section "Important information to review prior to importing", if you do not want the workorders set to <Closed> in AyaNova CE to be imported and  checkmarked Closed  in AyaNova v3 -  the workorders in AyaNova CE would need to be reset to <In Progress> prior to being imported into AyaNova v3.

As the AyaNova v3 database is erased automatically prior to importing via the CE Import utility, you can edit the workorders in AyaNova CE to <In Progress>, and than perform the import again without importing duplicate data.

The data in an AyaNova v3 database that is not erased is the Global Settings, the default AyaNova Administrator user with username manager with password letmein, Tax Codes, Regions, Default warehouse, Localized Text, and any sample reports,  in the AyaNova v3 database

- Joyce

AyaNova Sales & Technical Support

http://www.ayanova.com