Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Should it be possible to list multiple areas in the to "To" and "From" fields of Movement records?
This would essentially allow assets to occupy multiple locations at the same time. For example, if you have a planting that spans multiple beds, or if you have a group of animals that span multiple paddocks (where the two paddocks are connected by an open gate, for example).
Will this cause any issues with the existing location architecture?
Comments
Comment #1
m.stentaFor a little bit of history about the decision to structure locations/movements the way that they are currently, see: #2373999: Recordkeeping: Locations vs Movements?
Comment #2
m.stentaComment #3
Dorn CreditAttribution: Dorn commentedOne option might be to "clone" a planting, so that the data entry doesn't have to be done again, and then if there were slight adjustments, that could be done at that time.
If we are going to move to a more precision model of inputs, and seed rates then a more granular database of plantings will be required. If for example I want to record that in part of the field I increased the seed rate, then the areas and plantings should enable for that level of detailed recording.
When adding a planting, after it is complete, the "area" where it was planted is shown. It would be helpful if the adjacent areas were also displayed, but with the area just planted centered. This would enable an adjacent area to be selected, with the option of "cloning" and then customizing a previous planting.
Comment #4
Dorn CreditAttribution: Dorn commentedAnother thought: If a separate "add planting" is needed for each area, then one way to ease the adding of new plantings would be to include a location field directly within the "add planting" Then the initial "add movement" with the area could already filled in (if add planting was selected from a particular area). It would also be possible to have the ability for multiple "cloned" plantings to be added with a meaningful naming convention (eg crop, season, area).
This might look something like:
Winter Rye, Fall 2014, Kidder Field Bed A1
(clone) Winter Rye, Fall 2014, Kidder Field Bed A2
(clone) Winter Rye, Fall 2014, Kidder Field Bed A3
(clone) Winter Rye, Fall 2014, Kidder Field Bed A4
With this approach, groups of related plantings could be created by selecting a crop, then selecting multiple areas(check boxes from a list?), after which multiple plantings would be created.
Comment #5
Dorn CreditAttribution: Dorn commentedAnother complexity when applying plantings to areas is the selection of multiple crops and seed rates within a planting. This is important when recording cover crop mixes. for example, a mix might have by weight 30% oats, 50% peas and 20% radish. The total rate might be 30lbs/acre for the mix, but since the mix may change by planting it does not make sense to create a crop for each mix.
Comment #6
m.stentaRelated but different: #2457243: Multi-value asset reference fields on Activity, Movement, and Observation logs
Comment #7
m.stentaI'm looking into enabling multiple area references in the "To" field of movements - essentially allowing you to say that an asset moved to more than one area at once. Note: you can already reference multiple areas in the "From" field of movements, but the "To" field is a little more complicated because it is used in multiple places throughout farmOS to determine the "location" of the asset.
A number of other ideas were mentioned above in this issue, so I'm spinning some of them off into their own feature requests:
#2615468: Clone assets
#2615472: Variable input/seeding rates and mixes
Dorn: next time we're on a call, I'd like to better understand your idea in comment #4 above. Sounds like a good one too.
Comment #8
m.stentaChanged the name because this task is now for allowing multiple "To" areas (multiple "From" areas is already possible).
Comment #10
m.stentaAlright! It's now possible to create movements to multiple areas! The latest movement log is still responsible for defining the current location, but multiple "To" areas can be referenced in a single movement now. The geometry field can be used to specify a more precise location.
Comment #11
m.stentaMoving old issues to the canonical farmOS project for easier searching. Apologies for email spam if anyone is following these. :-)