KwaMoja: weberp

Showing posts with label weberp. Show all posts

Wednesday 5 June 2013

How to keep a stable KwaMoja/webERP installation updated

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the webERP forums about how to keep a stable version of your implementation, so I thought it might be a good moment to write an article on how to do this.

Firstly Web ERP Africa Ltd keeps a stable branch of the webERP code. This takes the last release (4.10.1 at the moment I write this) and then just adds in any bug fixes that have been applied to the main line. Obviously this does not include any bug fix to any new functionality, as that functionality does not exist in the stable branch. We also apply our regression tests to these fixes, to ensure that they are not re-introducing any previous bugs. This branch should then get progressively more stable, but anybody who wants the latest features can use the main trunk. I have made this stable branch publicly available from my github repository and can be found here. You can download a zip file containing this code from here. This zip file is automatically updated when a new bug fix is applied.

Exactly the same is true for KwaMoja, it's stable branch can be found by using the master branch here.

So if you are using a KwaMoja/webERP that has no customisations in it then all you have to do, is to keep an eye on this repository, and download new versions as and when it is updated.

However there are potential problems when you have customised scripts in your installation. I will assume that if the user has the knowledge to change the files then they will have a small knowledge of IT, and you will need the application Git installed.

What we wish is to avoid the code being over written when updating from the stable branch. I have created a small git repository here to represent the stable branch, and have uploaded the following script to it, calling it HelloWorld.php:

<?php
include('includes/session.inc');
$Title = _('Hello World');
include('includes/header.inc');
echo '<p class="page_title_text noPrint" ><img src="'.$RootPath.'/css/'.$Theme.'/images/user.png" width="24px" title="' . _('Hello World') . '" alt="" />' . _('Hello World') . '</p>';
if (isset($_POST['Submit'])) {
    /* Get clients IP address */
    $IPAddress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    /* Has user been here before? */
    $SQL = "SELECT count(name) as names
                FROM helloworld
                WHERE name='" . $_POST['Name'] . "'
                    AND ipaddress='" . $IPAddress . "'";
    $Result = DB_query($SQL, $db);
    $MyRow = DB_fetch_array($Result);
    if ($MyRow['names'] > 0) {
        prnMsg( _('Welcome back') . ' ' . $_POST['Name'], 'info');
    } else {
        $SQL = "INSERT INTO helloworld (ipaddress,
                                        name)
                                    VALUES (
                                        '" . $IPAddress . "',
                                        '" . $_POST['Name'] . "'
                                    )";
        $Result = DB_query($SQL, $db);
        prnMsg( _('Hi') . ' ' . $_POST['Name'], 'info');
    }
} else {
    echo '<div class="page_help_text noPrint">' . _('Enter your name in the box below.') . '</div>';
    echo '<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="' . htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'],ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8') . '" method="post" class="noPrint">';
    echo '<input type="hidden" name="FormID" value="' . $_SESSION['FormID'] . '" />';
    echo '<div class="centre">
            <input type="text" name="Name" />
        </div>
        <div class="centre">
            <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" />
        </div>';
    echo '</form>';
}
include('includes/footer.inc');
?>

Now you can pull this code to your own machine by issuing the command:

git clone git@github.com:timschofield/Example1.git

Now we make a local change to our code. We will change the word 'Hi' to 'Hello'. Now if we wish to update our code to the latest from the repository we would issue the command:

git pull git@github.com:timschofield/Example1.git

and this will update any changes - if there were any new bug fixes applied for instance. However you will notice that Git is smart enough not to try and overwrite your code that you changed locally.

So by using Git we can update our code to the latest stable branch, whilst keeping our local changes in place.

Wednesday 22 May 2013

New Work Order Entry script

I have never liked the old method of entering work orders in webERP and now I am no longer allowed to help people on the mailing lists and forums I have more time to devote to correcting it.

The old script didn't follow the normal webERP conventions, for instance it allocated a work order number, as soon as user clicked on that menu option, even if they didn't go on to enter an order, and this meant tracking order numbers was impossible. Sales and purchase orders both use a class to hold the order details in but Work orders didn't. The code was messy, and didn't abide by the coding guidelines.

In fact I am surprised it was ever allowed to corrupt the code base. I have just uploaded a revised script, which has more functionality, but in a lot less code. "Do more with less" is a good motto for these types of things.

Unfortunately I am not allowed to push this new functionality to the webERP svn repository, so you need to get it from here https://github.com/timschofield/KwaMoja/archive/develop.zip if you wish to test it. Hopefully someone who is still allowed to commit to svn will push it to webERP.

Any issues or bugs please let me know.

Monday 20 May 2013

Phil Daintree and his "hate pages"

Tuesday 14 May 2013

ABC analysis of stock items.

One of the most important methods of keeping accurate stock levels - though by no means the most widely used, especially in Africa - is cyclical stock checking. That is the constant checking of the stock throughout a financial period, rather than leaving stock checks to the period end.

This has two big advantages in the control of an organisations stock. Firstly the stock levels are kept in a much more accurate state as they are checked more frequently, and secondly any variances are far easier to track down if the period between checking the item is much shorter.

A necessary prerequisite of cyclical stock checking is an ABC analysis of the organisations stock. By ABC analysis I mean to rank the items by:

A - The most important items to the organisation

B - Important to the organisation but not critical

C - Slow moving or non important stock items.

At the moment we have no ABC analysis. This is a proposal to rectify that.

ABC classification is a way of grouping your stock items. There are a few different ways to set up an ABC Ranking, such as Velocity (times sold), Quantity sold/Consumed or by Margin. But the most common method is the Annual Sales Volume ranking. This method will allow you to identify the small number of items that usually account for most of your sales value (think 80/20 rule).

My plan is to first implement Annual Sales Volume Ranking method, but to do it in such a way as to make adding other methods easy in the future. To do this I propose to setup a table to hold the methods to be used. This table will have the following structure:

CREATE TABLE `abcmethods` (
     `methodid` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
     `methodname` VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
     PRIMARY KEY (`methodid`)
);

Initially this will have just one record in,
methodid=>0
methodname=>Annual Sales Volume Ranking

The next table will contain the groups that are being used. This will specify the criteria used. Each method can have several groups. I propose the following table:

CREATE TABLE `abcgroups`(
     `groupid` INT(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
     `groupname` VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
     `methodid` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
     `apercentage` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
     `bpercentage` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
     `cpercentage` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
   `zerousage` CHAR(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'D',
   `months` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 12,
   PRIMARY KEY (`groupid`),
   CONSTRAINT `abcgroups_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`methodid`) REFERENCES `abcmethods` (`methodid`)
);

The zerousage field is intended to hold the category into which items that have no usage at all should be put. This would normally be C or D. The months field is the number of prior months movements that should be analysed.
Finally I propose a separate table to hold the ABC category for each item and group. This would look like:

CREATE TABLE `abcstock` (
     `groupid` INT(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
     `stockid` VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
     `abccategory` CHAR(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'C',
     PRIMARY KEY (`groupid`, `stockid`),
   CONSTRAINT `abcstock_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`groupid`) REFERENCES `abcgroups` (`groupid`),
   CONSTRAINT `abcstock_ibfk_2` FOREIGN KEY (`stockid`) REFERENCES `stockmaster` (`stockid`)
);

Using these three tables should provide for a very flexible system, easily changed in the future.

The function to actually assign the categories would work something like this:

1. Calculate the 12 month value usage for all of the stock items.

2. Rank the items in descending order by value.

3. The "A" items are the top 80%.

4. The "B" items make up the next 15%.

5. The "C" items are the remaining items that have any usage in the period being looked at.

6. Label zero-usage items as "D".

Comments and constructive (yes Phil I am looking at you!) criticisms would be very much appreciated.

Friday 3 May 2013

Where did you say the truth was Phil?

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will apologise and amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

Phil Daintree has recently started to say that the truth is at the web site he hijacked from a project that was started by an Indian gentleman as a result of this exchange on here:

http://weberp-accounting.1478800.n4.nabble.com/Add-all-into-Shipment-td4655643.html#a4655738

However let us ignore the ethics of stealing another projects domain name to use to attack a developer in your own project, but rather let us put to rest what is really the truth once and for all.

Writing "Hate Pages" about fellow developers and then denying them the right to reply has always been Phil Daintree's weapon of choice when trying to bully developers out of the project. Back on 11 September 2007 when Phil was trying to bully most of the early webERP developers out of the project, he wrote to me telling me he had written one of his hate pages about them and was going to publish it on weberp.org. At the time I dissuaded him from this action. He again brought the subject on the following day, and again I had to dissuade him. Unfortunately when he came to writing his "hate page" about me there was nobody left to dissuade him.

Phil starts off by saying that the page is a defense against things I have said in this blog. However as anybody associated with the project for long can tell you Phil has been putting up hate pages about me for several years now, as can be seen rightv back in this thread: http://weberp-accounting.1478800.n4.nabble.com/AP-checks-td4019909.html#a4040317 All my blog posts are date stamped, so this is a lie.

Phil then says that anybody who opposes him must be me in disguise and says all their messages come from the same IP address. Where is your proof of this silly statement Phil? Oh there is none, because it is a lie! This from a man who poses on the internet as somebody called Anthony to attack me!!

Phil then goes on to say that the fixed asset module I wrote did not work. Yes it did, and is still in use at one of Uganda's biggest retailers (Bata shoes). Where is the link to these bugs Phil? Oh there is none because it is a lie.

Phil says he then removed me as admin. I have linked to the posts where he removed me as admin in an earlier blog post. The real reason was that he was upset that we had an argument over retaining the purchase order history. Where is your proof that this when you removed me Phil? Oh there is none because it is a lie!

Amendment 2712/2013:

Phil has now sent me evidence that he withdrew my svn access before the discussion on purchase ordering. This may or may not prove that he also withdrew my admin at this point, but he certainly didn't have the courage to tell me this either publicly or privately until after he had his ego dented by the PO conversation.

Phil then claims credit for some changes done to purchase ordering. As I have linked to in an earlier post the changes were written by me. As I had at that point had my access to svn removed, I posted the changes to a different repository. As demonstrated in the earlier post, Phil took my commit and then posted it the following day (these commits are date stamped by sourceforge) claiming it as his own work!! What is more incredible is that he now claims I "bitterly opposed" my own changes. Phil where is your proof of any of this? Oh there is none because it is a lie.

Phil says he originally removed my svn access because I was overwriting his changes. Does he post any links to this? No he doesn't because there are none. It is just another of his lies.

Amendment 27/12/2013

Phil has now sent me a commit where I had accidentally over written some changes that he had done. I apologised for this almost immediately after, as our commits had crossed. I was in Africa at the time on a very slow internet connection and hadn't had time to update. The commit only overwrote some case changes to variable names. Hardly the crime of the century. Certainly not as bad as his recent commit forcing many users off webERP. My reaction was to immediately apologise to Phil , and explain. His reaction was to remove my SVN access.

Phil says I wanted to do the database upgrades in a new language of my own invention calle "pseudo sql" In fact the language was PHP as can be seen here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/weberp/code/9402/ Where is the proof of this new language Phil? Oh there is none because it is a lie!

Phil then claims I was "violently" opposed to his number formatting system. All I suggested was that we used the functionality that PHP provides for doing this instead of inventing his own functionality. No violence used whatsoever!! Phil's solution also requires that the locale be installed, as has been discovered by him since. Where is your proof of this "violence" Phil? Oh there is none because it is another lie!

Phil then goes into a long diatribe on his attempt to claim the copyright to the whole codebase. This contradicts itself at every twist and turn, in his desperate attempts to deny it. As far as I can make out the latest story is that saying that the copyright is owned by weberp.org is a secret code for saying that the copyright is actually owned by the individual authors. Really Phil? In that case why the need for a secret code? Why the need for subterfuge? If thats what you mean just say it and be clear! Or is it just another lie?

He then goes on to say that my access to the mailing list is only moderated! Not so as anyone can see from the messages to that nabble forum. For instance here:
http://weberp-accounting.1478800.n4.nabble.com/BOMExtendedQTY-php-does-not-properly-handle-PO-Quantities-td4656253.html As anyone can see Bob's postings to the nabble forum are allowed through to the mailing lists mine are not. Are these postings in any way abusive? No, it is just another of Phil's lies.

On the subject of abuse as anybody can see by reading the archives, more often than not the abuse was started by Phil, as a result of him losing a technical discussion.

Phil says he took away my svn access because I was no longer making a useful contribution. Strange that he has continued to take my code and commit it, just claiming it as his own code!! Does he post any links to where my contribution was not useful? No he doesn't.

Phil then goes into a long quote purportedly written by me. Does he post a link to this post? No he doesn't. Can he find it in googles cache? No he can't. In fact can he find it anywhere? No can you as a reader? I have tried searching for it by using some phrases from it, and the only person who appears to have written it is Phil Daintree. Oh dear another lie Phil?

He then prints a reply to his own comment. I shall ignore most of this as commenting on his own comment is just silly.

Then he tries to justify a different method of calculating a developers contribution to the code. All I can do is point people to his original comment here: http://weberp-accounting.1478800.n4.nabble.com/Copyright-notices-and-License-statements-tt1487216.html#a1487221 How bitter do you have to be to keep changing these things to try and show that you are a bigger and more important person??

+Phil Daintree says in his hate pages:

"http://sourceforge.net/p/web-erp/code/5834

contained references to his Kwamoja fork.

I asked him to review and fix it... he refused."

Strange because http://sourceforge.net/p/web-erp/code/5836/ clearly shows me

removing these references to KwaMoja immediately +Phil Daintree  pointed out my mistake - An

accidental mistake I apologised to him about straight away. He then goes on to fabricate

an email where I apparently say I wasn't going to remove these references, even

though sourceforges SVN clearly shows I already had!!

+Phil Daintree says that I am not a member of the ICAEW. Quite right I am not, but when did I claim to be?

What I have said is that I am a UK qualified accountant. Phil is very careful in his choice of language

here because he implies that I am not a qualified accountant without actually saying so.

He knows what my qualifications are because I have shown them to him so he resorts to such

innuendo in the hope people won't read too deeply into what he says. This is another reason why

+Phil Daintree  is so frightened of allowing me a right to reply to his lies.

+Phil Daintree has said I overwrote some of his work on purchase ordering and has

linked to some commits on this subject. Yes I fixed some bugs as Phil's work didn't

deal with cancelled orders. I notice these bug fixes are still in the webERP code

today!! Strange that exactly 5 years on Phil hasn't got around to removing this

code if it is so bad!! It is typical of the man that he tells these lies and doesn't have the

honesty to allow me to link to the evidence showing that all that he says about me

is just lies, lies, and yet more lies!

+Phil Daintree says in his hate pages that the reason he removed my ability to commit to the webERP project was that I misspelled the name of a CSS class in one of my commits. As anybody who understands HTML/CSS programming can tell him if a web browser finds a css class it doesn't know it just ignores it. There was no performance loss or harm to the user interface. Compare this to some of the really bad commits he and others have done! Interestingly a css class of the exact same name was soon added to webERP meaning that +Phil Daintree himself now commits code with this identical css class in it!!

So that's it? No comments on what I have said in this blog at all, despite that being what it was titled as. Just lies and nasty innuendos about my coding and my character that he cannot prove because they are just lies.

I will leave it to the reader to judge what is the truth. I have always been content to put the facts before the community and let them judge. I see no need for censorship or banning. So why does Phil believe in censorship and banning to avoid criticism?

ps Phil, can you stop sending the hate mail that pollutes my inbox every day?

Hate blog????????

Thursday 2 May 2013

KwaMoja/webERP security

This question came up recently on the webERP forum:

I'm new to webERP and naturally have some questions. I've created a role called "Inventory" in Access Permission Maintenance, then a user for this role and limited access to just "Display Inventory" module in User Maintenance. But I'd like to further limit access so my inventory user can NOT see pages in this range:

• Inventory Valuation Report
...
• List Negative Stocks
• Stock Transfer Note[/align]

The webERP Manual is vague on this. Is there a doc I can read to find out can I restrict a user, for example, to just Inventory.Maintenance.View or Update Prices Based On Costs?

Unfortunately the advice the poster was given was complex and not really correct, and the administrator of the forum has blocked me from helping people there. However, there is a much simpler answer which doesn't involve setting up phantom security tokens, and other complexities. This is to go to each of the reports they want removed in the "Page Security Settings" option in the setup module, and from there just give it a security token of a higher level than the inventory user. For instance set it to "General Ledger Reports/Inquiries" which makes more sense for something like an Inventory Valuation report. Then the report will be gone from the users screen the next time they log in. It's as simple as that!

However that led me to thinking that a lot of people (including it seems the current webERP project developer) who don't really understand the security system within KwaMoja/webERP so I thought it might be good to explain how it works.

Every user has a security role. These roles are meant to mirror their real life roles. So for instance we may have a role of an inventory clerk, and a role of an accountant. There can be any number of inventory clerks, and any number of accountants, all having the same role. As many roles as are wanted can be created.

Each role is given a number of security tokens. Each of these tokens permits the user with that role to perform different functions. There are a number of predefined tokens:

Main Index Page

Order Entry/Inquiries customer access only

Basic Reports and Inquiries with selection options

Credit notes and AR management

Purchasing data/PO Entry/Reorder Levels

Accounts Payable

Petty Cash

Bank Reconciliations

General ledger reports/inquiries

Supplier centre - Supplier access only

General Ledger Maintenance, stock valuation & Configuration

Inventory Management and Pricing

User Management and System Administration

When a user tries to access a function, the security token for that functionality is looked up in a database table called scripts and it is then compared with the array of security tokens that is owned by the role allotted to that user. If the token is in that array, the functionality can be accessed, if not, then access is denied.

This lookup is also performed when displaying the menus, and if the security token is not there, the menu option will not be displayed.

This system is simple elegant and flexible. It can be made as simple or as complex as an organisation requires. For instance a one person business only needs one security token, and one role, whereas a large business with hundreds of employees will have a very complex structure.

I hope this helps provide some insight into how the system works.

Thursday 25 April 2013

Phil Daintree's shameless lies - Part 6

Saturday 20 April 2013

Now can we all move on?

Saturday 13 April 2013

Phil Daintree's shameless lies - Part 5

Phil's claim to own the copyright of all the webERP code.

The Berne convention asserts that the copyright is owned by the author of a work unless they have explicitly handed over that ownership to a second party. It further states that no copyright message is needed to assert this right, and that proof of authorship is sufficient. Some free software projects (most notably the GNU project) ask that the copyright on all contributions be physically signed over to them. This has never been done with webERP and given that as he himself has said he has fallen out with most contributors it is unlikely that he would retrospectively given this permission.

In September 2012 Phil Daintree unilaterally took the decision to alter the footer on webERP to state that the copyright to all the code was owned by weberp.org, a domain name owned by himself. This was, in the words of Fred Schuettler (a contributor to webERP) an adolescent attempt by Phil Daintree to goad me into an argument on the subject.

However it is important to those of us who have contribute significantly to webERP (my contribution can be found by following the link Phil Daintree suggests in this email). Phil has suggested in the past that he wished to change the license to the Apache license, which would mean that anybody could take my code and turn it into a commercial closed source application. I am certainly not alone in the world of Free software by being opposed to my code being licensed in this way as a simple Google search will show you. Phil Daintree says he will swear in court to the fact that "Tim is violently opposed to this for his own reasons". This implies that:

1 - I have been violent on the subject. Even in writing I have merely stated that I don't like permissive licenses. Can Phil Daintree produce any example of violence, or would this be perjury if he swore to it in court?
2 - That my reasons are somehow devious. Is he stating that the libreoffice developers antipathy to the apache license devious?

When I queried why Phil Daintree had decided to make this change without speaking to any of the other contributors, he initially claimed that he was not the owner of weberp.org and that weberp.org was owned and controlled by all the contributors. However while trying to get the launchpad site set up by Zhiguo Yuan removed he asserts that "I am the owner of the weberp domain.". Also a simple whois search shows that Phil Daintree is the owner of weberp.org. If the contributors have any control of weberp.org then how come Phil Daintree has asserted that only content that he agrees with will be included? How come only he gets to decide who can help people on the forum? Come on Phil get real!

I then pointed out that weberp.org did not exist as a legal entity and so could not own the copyright. Phil countered here by saying that "weberp.org did exist as a legal entity by vitue of the statement ol intent". However his recent statement on this issue says "To even suggest that a domain name could actually own anything is foolishness in any event". Who is the fool Phil? It appears that he has done a 180 degree turn on this and still ended up pointing the same way!!

In English law there is a concept (and most countries have a similar concept in their law) called the man on the Clapham omnibus. This basically asks what the ordinary reasonable person approaching an issue would think. I assert that any reasonable person on viewing webERP would believe that the copyright is owned by weberp.org, and on looking up that domain name would believe it was owned by Phil Daintree, and thus the copyright was owned by Phil Daintree.

Phil Daintree now asserts that when he is saying that weberp.org owns the copyright then "any idiot" would see that he meant that the copyright was owned by the contributors. Obviously I am not an idiot then!! If this is what Phil Daintree means then why the subterfuge? Why not just say that? All I have ever asked him to do is to clarify his motives for making that change at that point in time.

Phil Daintree likes to pretend that the only person who is upset by his claims to own the copyright of all the code. Not so. This has been an going issue with other developers since that start of the project.

So I say, "Come on Phil tell us the reason you made this change".

+Phil Daintree

that he creates a COPYRIGHT.txt file in webERP he clearly lays out that the copyright of the contributions belongs to the author of those contributions, which if he wants he can then link to from the footer of every page. +Phil Daintree refuses to even consider this. People can decide for themselves why he will not make a clear and unequivocal statement like this>

Sunday 7 April 2013

Who does he think he is punishing?

Programming the KwaMoja API - Error codes

In the last couple of parts of this tutorial which can be found here

API Client Part 1 and API Client Part 2

we produced a simple client application where a user selected a location, typed in a part code and the application fetched the info about how much stock was available from that location from our KwaMoja implementation.

This code can be fetched from here:

http://www.kwamoja.com/documentation/xml-rpc_tutorial.zip

However we did not touch on what would happen if something goes wrong. Load up the application, and you should see a screen similar to this one:

Now load index.php into our editor and change the password on line 38 from 'kwamoja' to 'wrong'. Now if we reload index.php we get this screen.

As you can see it cannot fetch any locations as the authentication does not work on this kwamoja instance. However it provides us with no information about why this has happened. If you recall from the tutorials regarding the writing of the client, the XML-RPC call returns an array containing two elements, the first - $Response[0] in our client - contains an integer code, and the second the result of the inquiry, if one is expected. If the integer code is zero, this indicates success. Any other code indicates an error. These error code can be found listed here. As you can see error code 1 indicates 'NoAuthorisation' which will be the error returned if the user name or password is incorrect.

To catch the errors we create a session variable (not the best way I know, but convenient for this tutorial) to hold any error messages that happen, so that we can show the to the user. So the initialisation code at the top of index.php becomes:

<?php
    include 'xmlrpc/lib/xmlrpc.inc';
    $xmlrpc_internalencoding='UTF-8';
    include 'xmlrpc/lib/xmlrpcs.inc';
    $_SESSION['Errors'] = array();
?>

and then at the bottom of the output we have a loop to output these errors:

foreach ($_SESSION['Errors'] as $Error) {
    echo $Error;
}

Now we just need to capture that error. We need to put this code at the bottom of the GetLocations() function so that it now reads:

if ($ReturnValue[0] == 0) {
    return $ReturnValue[1];
} elseif ($ReturnValue[0] == 1) {
    $_SESSION['Errors'][] = 'Incorrect login/password credentials used';
}

Now run the index.php script again in your browser and you should get out put similar to this:

We just need to put this code at the bottom of our other functions, and then they will all be able to catch this error.

Now if we put the proper password back in index.php should work as before.

Now try entering a stock code that you know doesn't exist and see what happens. I entered a part code called 'wrong' and this is what I see.

This is not very helpful output so we need catch this error. A quick look here shows that error code 1047 is 'StockCodeDoesntExist' and this should be returned if the code we entered is wrong. So we need to capture error 1047 in the GetStockQuantity() function. The code at the end of this function now becomes:

} elseif ($ReturnValue[0] == 1) {
$_SESSION['Errors'][] = 'Incorrect login/password credentials used';
} elseif ($ReturnValue[0] == 1047) {
$_SESSION['Errors'][] = 'The stock code you entered does not exist';
}

So now the function is checking that the user/password is correct and also checking that the stock code is correct and providing useful feedback in the case of any problems. We could go on and check for other errors but this should be enough for now.

I have uploaded the new tutorial files to here.

Next time I will have a look at debugging the application when an error we haven't caught occurs.