I’ve been formulating ideas for a new Observation quick form in farmOS core. I’m imagining something that is very general-purpose, but can also be “configurable” (like the Inventory quick form), which would allow users to create multiple “instances” of it that are pre-configured.
For example, imagine if you could create an “instance” of the Observation quick form that is specifically for a “Pasture Health Observation”, which collects specific data points like grass height and pasture condition. Or a “Potato Beetle Observation” quick form, for counting pests. The potential options are limitless, and it would open the door to a lot more community-defined conventions.
The other benefit of “configurable quick forms” is that they can be exported as YML files, and imported into other farmOS instances. This means they can be shared. Or they can be packaged into modules and installed with additional functionality/UI. For example, imagine a module that provides a pre-configured observation quick form along with a custom report UI that graphs all of the observation data that was created from it.
I’m excited to see what the community could build with a tool like this.
So… what would be useful in an “Observation” quick form? It seems to me like the following features are necessary:
Photo attachments
Quantitative measurements (configurable so you can create standard sets of measurements that you always want to collect in a consistent way)
Related assets and/or the location that the observation took place
Maybe a button to automatically capture a GPS point from the user’s device, so you can pinpoint exactly where the observation took place
Notes
… ?
What else would folks like to see? What would you use something like this for?
Yes indeed! There is some overlap in use cases for configurable quick forms and templates. There will be advantages/disadvantages to both too. The Template module is not part of farmOS core, whereas configurable quick forms are. I see them as potentially serving different levels of complexity, where core quick forms aim to provide some simple defaults for 80% of use cases. The Template module will be capable of serving more advanced use cases. And of course a custom quick form serves the most advanced cases where complete customization is needed.
This is a great addon
I think you covered the features I can think of.
Possibly out of the scope for this case but:
It could be useful to rule out assets you’d never select on the quickform.
So only a few is possible to select. Example: Not all vehicles, just tractor A or B
Something to keep in mind is a growing list of quickforms.
It can potentionally grow big and not so intuitive.
Could it be a useful addon to make the Observation quickforms show under the “new observaion log” button too?
Like listing them up here:
Maybe a bit too complex, but I think it makes some sense since you’re able to create all observations from one place.
Maybe it could help to have a quickform selector on the dashboard.
Maybe all observation quicforms listed. Or a configurable one, like showing the favorite forms.
I like this idea. Perhaps it could be one of the “configuration” options. I could see this being useful for other configurable quick forms too, so maybe it can be approached generally.
I thought about this too. One idea might be to restructure the quick form menu and index page somehow, so that it can scale a bit better. Or provide some options to organize it yourself.
Good point! Actually it would be nice to be able to link to other quick forms this way too. I’ll give that some thought…
