Starting Over

It's been a while we had our store working with the magento-checkout extension I wrote. But obviously, it's buggy. I figure out how to avoid all bugs coz I wrote the code, but I want to share everything and so everyone can benefit from my work.

So, I am rewriting the whole thing. I will revamp the whole extension.
I have been testing with Checkout's integrated ecommerce (EnStore). First it will not work in my country, nor with my currency. So to test, I put location the US, and USDollar currency.
Also Enstore is trying to lease the hosting, which makes it inconvenient of using a "username.enstore.com" address instead of your own address (like "blabla.com").

From what I see, they are making Enstore work as a interface to Checkout's DB, they will provide APIs for integration. Also it is very under construction and far from being done, this is why it is for free while in beta. Magento has lots of payment and shipping methods too, and very integratable, and since we have access to Checkout's DB then we can work on a clean Sync solution.

I will put in mind to be able to Sync in a Checkout->Magento way. My previous module was a Magento->Checkout solution, maybe I will use some features in the end to enable sync both ways.

First thing I noticed about integrating Enstore with Checkout. Preferences table holds the webstore identification and last sync time.
The sync was meant to be MANUAL, I will put in mind to make possible syncing to Magento Automatically.

Products info (like name, price,barcode...etc) all are saved in metavalue and metanumber tables along with a timestamp to figure out if this was changed after last sync was done... (that is very helpful).

BUT, STOCK....stock does not have a timestamp in stock table. Obviously in Enstore, there are no quantities being added during sync. This is not convenient as what if the product is out of stock, you shouldn't have to manually disable the product from being sold, this should be done automatically.

I figured out how to add a timestamp column to the stock table that auto updates on creation or on modification.(thanks to POINTBEING.NET). So I will modify the stock table, which I think will make no problem upgrading later to newer versions of Checkout...but hey let's see over time.

The code for adding this column is:

ALTER TABLE stock
ADD lastmodified TIMESTAMP;

ALTER TABLE stock
ALTER COLUMN lastmodified
SET DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;

UPDATE stock
SET lastmodified=CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_lastmodified_column()
RETURNS TRIGGER AS '
BEGIN
NEW.lastmodified = NOW();
RETURN NEW;
END;
' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';

CREATE TRIGGER update_lastmodified_modtime BEFORE UPDATE
ON stock FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE
update_lastmodified_column();

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