[ic] Inventory control in 5.2.0

[Ethan Rowe]

Bill Eichin wrote:

>I'm in the middle of testing a new webstore.  I just placed an order for
>700 pieces of an item that only has 53 in stock; the order went through
>and is now pending.  But that's not what I want...
>
>At the very least, I want the cart to prevent someone from ordering more
>than there are in stock.  I thought that's what DECREMENT INVENTORY = 1
>in the hidden "variables" table stood for... I'm still looking for
>documentation on this, but can someone help me out here?
>
>Thanks, in advance,
>
>--Bill
>  Eichin
>  
>
Inventory control is relatively limited "out of the box", presumably 
because there are so many different approaches to inventory management.

All the DECREMENT_INVENTORY variable does is tell the log_transactions 
order route step to decrement all inventory for items ordered when 
posting orders to the database.  To my knowledge, it provides no other 
function.

I worked on an online store that had fairly strict requirements for 
inventory control.  I found, in that situation, that it was best 
achieved using triggers in PostgreSQL to make inventory changes as 
appropriate rather than having inventory adjustments (on a per-order 
basis, at least) in the application level.  This isn't going to help 
you, though, unless you're using a trigger-enabled RDBMS like PostgreSQL.

Anyway, to understand what the inventory decrement is doing, check out 
CATROOT/etc/log_transaction

-- 
Ethan Rowe
End Point Corporation
ethan at endpoint.com