Preferred way for dealing with customer-defined data in enterprise application
- by Axarydax
Let's say that we have a small enterprise web (intranet) application for managing data for car dealers. It has screens for managing customers, inventory, orders, warranties and workshops.
This application is installed at 10 customer sites for different car dealers.
First version of this application was created without any way to provide for customer-specific data. For example, if dealer A wanted to be able to attach a photo to a customer, dealer B wanted to add e-mail contact to each workshop, and dealer C wanted to attach multiple PDF reports to a warranty, each and every feature like this was added to the application, so all of the customers received everything on new update.
However, this will inevitably lead to conflicts as the number of customers grow as their usage patterns are unique, and if, for instance, a specific dealer requested to have an ability to attach (for some reason) a color of inventory item (and be able to search by this color) as a required item, others really wouldn't need this feature, and definitely will not want it to be a required item. Or, one dealer would like to manage e-mail contacts for their employees on a separate screen of the application.
I imagine that a solution for this is to use a kind of plugin system, where we would have a core of the application that provides for standard features like customers, inventory, etc, and all of the customer's installed plugins.
There would be different kinds of plugins - standalone screens like e-mail contacts for employees, with their own logic, and customer plugin which would extend or decorate inventory items (like photo or color).
Inventory (customer,order,...) plugins would require to have installation procedure, hooks for plugging into the item editor, item displayer, item filtering for searching, backup hook and such.
Is this the right way to solve this problem?
