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Re: The future of oca/bank-payment

Up to the moment, I haven't heard any convincing reason to switch to the new refactoring, except saying the generic words "it does bring value, in terms of compatibility and interoperability with standard Odoo", which is not true, as the compatibility was assured in my previous refactoring generating 100% compatible account.payment records with the account.payment.method.line set on them. On contrary, this new refactoring is deforming more the standard, touching a lot the account.payment.method.line object, as you can see in https://github.com/OCA/bank-payment/pull/1401/files#diff-be0f3f1e5863cde871372af8c252f077a8111278e1fdda3f562415e2d96164ce, trying to convert this object into account.payment.mode. Why doing that if we already have the exact model we need?!! And it's also limiting the selection of the standard res.partner many2one fields. This is not making it more compatible, this is breaking enterprise modules' way or working, as you can't select the payment method line they need!

The effort to educate all our users to the new system is not justified, and there's still more work to do, as the migration scripts are not done.

Finally, this new refactoring has been done over the forked 16.0 version of Alexis, not the clean 17.0 latest version, which is discarding all the contributions made by other OCA contributors meanwhile, which is ugly, and it will also cause solved bugs to appear again.

Due to all of this, we should stick to the existing version, and answering Michael's reply that has just entered while I was redacting this, the current suite has no technical debt. Don't get it wrong.

Regards.

by Pedro M. Baeza - 08:40 - 28 Mar 2025

Reference

  • The future of oca/bank-payment
    Hi everyone,

    The oca/bank-payment repository has the essential modules to prepare and generate SEPA (and more) payment orders for credit transfer and direct debit.

    Today, there are important decisions to make about the future of this module.

    18 months ago, Alexis de Lattre, (one of) the original authors of these modules, started a huge effort to modernize these modules and improve their overall quality.
    He explained his approach in this PR 1174 for 16.0  [1]. 
    Naturally, that PR was not merged because it came too late in the 16.0 release cycle. 

    Now Alexis continues this effort with a series of 18.0 pull requests, with the important addition that he proposes to replace the Payment Mode object by the now native object from Odoo. 

    In Odoo v18, Odoo SA introduced new "Payment mode" M2O fields in the "account" module (cf this commit [6]):
    - on res.partner : one property field "Customer Payment Method" and one property field "Supplier Payment Method"
    - on invoices (account.move) : one field "Payment Method", copied from res.partner and that can be modified
    Up to Odoo v17, these "Payment mode" fields were not native ; they were added by the OCA module account_payment_partner from OCA/bank-payment.
    These new native "Payment mode" fields use the model account.payment.method.line (which was introduced in v15).

    Migrating to use these native fields makes a lot of sense to align with Odoo to avoid duplication of fields and logic.

    For more context, There was some discussion in the 16.0 PR [1], the 18.0 migration issue [4], as well as [5].

    I personally very much welcome this effort as I think the quality of Alexis' work is excellent (as usual), and this will create a solid foundation for the future.
    Indeed, over the many years of history of these modules, the only significant refactoring was Pedro's important work to adapt them to use Account Payment, and these modules start to show their great age.

    Alexis' work can be tested on runboat PR 1406 for direct debit [2] and PR 1405 for credit transfer [3]. From the preliminary tests we have done at Acsone it works fine.

    Of course, such work is not a traditional migration, and is difficult to review due to the importance of the changes. This will also create some additional migration work for maintainers of modules that depend on it (for instance the migration from Payment Mode to native Payment Methods will require some effort, although not difficult).

    On the other hand, reaching the same result by incremental improvements is going to be impossible, because as soon as a module is merged it starts to be extended, and some evolutions will not be possible in a backward-compatible way.

    So Akretion and Acsone propose to add migration scripts, and merge Alexis' work in 18.0 and rapidly iterate from there to review and add possible features that would have been missed in the transition. At Acsone we plan to put significant effort on this repo in the coming 3-4 months.

    Would there be agreement on such an approach?

    Best regards,

    -Stéphane


    by Stéphane Bidoul - 11:45 - 26 Mar 2025