I set up 4 asset groups. On log entries, I assign one of the groups to help differentiate between “cash crop” versus “cover crop” related stuff. When I list the asset groups and click on one, none of the log entries for that asset group appear. Why?
The “Logs” tab on assets only shows logs that directly reference that specific asset. So if your log referenced the group asset itself, it would show up.
We’ve talked in the past about having some way of seeing all the logs associated with a group on the member assets (sort of the opposite of what you’re describing). But I could see it being useful both ways too.
Group assets were originally added to solve the “animal herd” problem, so you could create a Group asset named “Herd 1” and assign individual Animal assets to it, then move that herd from place to place rather than moving all the individual animals. The main “feature” they provide is that you can keep track of when assets became members of a group, and when that membership changes… much like how you can keep track of location changes over time via movement logs. Beyond that, not much work was put into using that group relationship in other places. But it feels like a no-brainer that to add those kinds of features!
We would need to be careful to make it clear which assets the logs are actually associated with somehow… to prevent any confusion. So it might need to be a different tab, or a sub-tab of “Logs”, or some kind of checkbox to make it clear that you’re including more than just direct record relationships like it does now… 
@graffte
Interesting setup for covercrops. I’ve not used farmOS for crops yet. Have other software for that use, but I don’t find them very good at the covercrop part and some other stuff.
The more I learn about farmOS and the (seems to me) endless posibillities.
Inspires me to get 
“farmOS-ready” for next season
In your harvest log, do you have some fancy automatic involved?
The last screen shot is a log with the Cash Crop group referenced. It doesn’t show up in the list of Cash Crop log entries. “The “Logs” tab on assets only shows logs that directly reference that specific asset. So if your log referenced the group asset itself, it would show up”. Do I have to go through and assign the assets individually to the Group too even though it is selected on the various other logs? I guess this is the herd situation you mention.
My main interest in the Asset group is to allow tracking the Grain (physical asset) generated by the Harvests. Track it through storage, cleaning, and sale. There is no end product asset per say (like GRAIN). This release added a SEED asset that becomes a PLANT asset when associated with a location (field) and Seeding activity. When the PLANT asset is harvested, there is an end PRODUCT asset in my case grain. All these stages of asset transformation involve increasing value add and respective costs (the activities, inputs etc). I am trying to track the assets involved with production through the business cycle. My organic certification audits also try to follow the crop through this asset cycle. The auditors look at seeding rates, fertility, and resulting grain produced to see if it all lines up. Checking if there enough seed to deliver the resulting harvest, and whether the harvest shown is smaller than would be expected given the qty of seed and inputs. They generally call this audit evaluation “mass balance”. Setting up a GRAIN asset group was more of a stop gap to see if I could figure out some sort of way to do this tracking and generate a nice comprehensive report for the mass balance evaluation steps because I need to cleanly show all this or risk losing my organic certification.
The Cover Crop management side is a work in process. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do it. I’m leaning on just treating them like any other crop. ie record them as SEED and PLANT asset and apply the same set of activities for logs. A cover crop is not harvested per say, but it can be thought of in a similar way by measuring tons of dry matter per acre grown, possibly include estimated N credits for legumes. I started out treating the cover crops more like an INPUT but this doesn’t seem to working well as a data model. Unfortunately, nothing automatic. Fat fingering everything. Not for the faint of heart. But in an organic certified system, I have to track EVERYTHING.
Growing organic here too, so I know…
That could work…
What’s been stopping me so far is a decent way to enter data on the mobile while working.
The FieldKit will eventually be available, and as @mstenta stated in the blog post https://farmos.org/blog/2023/farmOS-2.0.0 I’d bet we’ll see some good solutions soon.
2023 is going to be a fun year for farmOS development. We have big plans and some exciting news to share soon! So stay tuned!
Some of our next priorities include new crop and grazing planning modules, more quick forms, new integrations with third-party services and models, development and documentation of standard record-keeping conventions, and much much more.
Also, @Farmer-Ed is working on some android/node-red setup to simplify data entering.
I’m a bit on that track too.
Sorry for taking this a bit off topic.
Ah sorry @graffte, I wasn’t specific enough when I said:
The “Logs” tab on assets only shows logs that directly reference that specific asset.
Should have said:
The “Logs” tab on assets only shows logs that directly reference that specific asset in the Assets field of the log.
In your log, the groups are referenced in the “Group” reference field. Which I admit… seems like it would intuitively mean “this log is related to these groups”!
This tells me that we need to make this more clear how it works in the farmOS UI. Here is what the farmOS data model docs say:
Logs can reference Group Assets, along with the “Is group assignment” attribute (above) to indicate which group(s) the Assets will be members of.
So the “Groups” field on Logs is really only meant to be used if you check the “Is group assignment” checkbox on a log, to indicate that you are using the Log to assign assets to the referenced group(s).
Perhaps a simple first step to avoid this confusion would be to hide the Group field on Logs and only show it if “Is group assignment” is checked. Similar to how we hide/show the “Intrinsic geometry” field on Land assets when the “Is fixed” box is checked…
Oh I spoke to soon… we do this already!
The question that was asked as first question of this topic is quite relevant for us as well. FarmOS offers the ability to connect specific assest (plant batches in our case) to a group. (Perhaps for your interest: I’ve only found the software ‘Log and Solve’ from Klasmann Deilmann as something quite similar like FarmOS). I thought this grouping option indeed gave the option of logging group events to the log of individual assets as well. This would be a great benefit for our research purposes at our university. If this can be taken into account in a next update, this would be great.
But, if this is a difficult or complicated step to progam, is it then maybe possible to add a filter option to the ‘Select Assets’ tab that can filter for ‘Groups’ and ‘Location’ when adding a, for instance, new Input to that group? It then becomes quite easy as a user to select all assets connected to that specific group, which immedialy creates the option of adding the log, that account for that group, with a few clicks.
Welcome @f.tigchelhoff! Great question…
In theory it’s possible to show group logs on the asset level, and I think you can already operate with that as a mental model, even if it doesn’t show in the UI. farmOS does already have logic for using the group asset’s movement logs to determine group member asset location (if a group is moved to a new location, all of its member assets will move too).
I think the main question comes down to how would it work in the UI? We’ve discussed this a bit before. I’m not sure what would be most desirable… or if that might vary by context. For example, someone may want (or expect) to see all of a group’s logs intermingled with each individual asset’s logs. But someone else may not. There are also some technical hurdles to having them mixed together. So another idea might be to create two separate lists: the existing list of individual asset logs, and another list of the asset’s group’s logs.
(Another complexity is that an asset may change from group to group, so presumably we would want to only show group logs during the time that the asset was in that group. That’s certainly solvable but requires some thought, and may necessitate a database table for caching computed logs so that the queries are not insanely complicated and/or very slow. But I digress…)
I don’t know if I would recommend reference both the group and the asset with a log. You could if you want… but it feels unnecessary. The database already has all of the information needed to compute this. Storing the asset relationship in two places (the group membership and the individual input log) is redundant at best, and could lead to inconsistency at worst, if one changed without the other.
I think we’ve found an already present workaround for this question. We now choose to start in records>assets>Structure menu. There we pick the location we’d like to add the log input to. In that specific asset, we choose the ‘Assets’ button, which than shows all assets in that location. When the right assets are selected (just one button for ‘select all’, it’s possible to choose an ‘action’ that is applied for all selected assets. We than choose the right type of log, select the structure location in the next page. From there on it is the same as every log to have the log you are adding applied to all selected items all at once. Seems to work fine. So, actually it is solved for us for now.
Great @f.tigchelhoff! Sounds like you found a good solution! 
