I’m working on a project that has included a “End use” question in the specification for a quick form that creates plant assets. They requested that the options come from child terms of the “End Use Categories” parent term in the (log) categories taxonomy, but that the value be saved as the plant asset’s group. There are a couple errors with this requested spec but I think it illustrates a valid “desirable” use case we don’t support.
The errors/limitations of this spec:
The log categories taxonomy is only for logs.
Terms in this taxonomy are not directly associated with Group assets w/o additional logic to create matching groups and use group membership logs to assign the new asset to the correct group(s).
Considering the help description on the structure/taxonomy page:
Taxonomy is for categorizing content. Terms are grouped into vocabularies. For example, a vocabulary called “Fruit” would contain the terms “Apple” and “Banana”.
There is currently no way for users to categorize assets (content) with a flexible taxonomy that they can build themselves. We do have flags, but this is not currently something that users can add to from the UI like an “asset category” would enable.
Ideally separate records and relationships could be used in place of adding this additional layer of asset categories. For example, “End use” could be captured by a final log that references & archives the asset… but then this would need to be modeled before it has taken place?
I imagine we have had a similar discussion about this in the past. I did a quick search but didn’t find anything too relevant. Any thoughts on if assets should have a category as well?
In practice, the “Log Category” field often gets used for things that would probably be better off as their own field/taxonomy. For example: describing a log’s “purpose” - we have a plan to add a dedicated taxonomy for this in 4.x.
It also begs the question: should “Log Categories” and “Asset Categories” be separate? Or should there be one big “Categories” taxonomy that’s shared?
It would be nice to hear from others who would be interested in a generic “Asset Category” taxonomy, and specific examples of how they would use it.
Thinking more about this… I have some of my own use cases now that would benefit from simple asset categorization.
In practice, the “Log Category” field often gets used for things that would probably be better off as their own field/taxonomy.
This was my main hesitation earlier… but to be fair, “Log Category” is very useful for logs, even if it’s misused sometimes. So I can see the argument for a comparable ability to categorize assets. How people use (or misuse) that is up to them.
should “Log Categories” and “Asset Categories” be separate? Or should there be one big “Categories” taxonomy that’s shared?
This is the biggest question in my mind. And the direction we take has considerations for how and when we implement it…
Adding a separate taxonomy for “Asset Categories” is trivial. So we could do that in 4.x as a new feature.
Merging “Log Categories” into a new unified “Categories” taxonomy (if that’s what we call it) that is also shared with assets is trickier. Renaming the taxonomy would be a breaking change, so it would have to wait until 5.x.
It would be nice to hear from others who would be interested in a generic “Asset Category” taxonomy, and specific examples of how they would use it.
Maybe I’ll bring this up on a future dev/monthly call to see how others might use it. That might help determine if we need separate/shared vocabs.
The Group asset type is for tracking “group membership” of assets over time. For example, individual sheep animal assets that are part of “Sheep Herd 1” (a group asset), but maybe some move to a different herd (group) in the future. Group membership is tracked via logs, just like location changes, so you have a history of what group(s) an asset was in over time.
This new Asset Category taxonomy would just be for “tagging” assets to categorize them. It could certainly be used as a simpler alternative to the Group asset, if you don’t need to track group changes over time, and just want to give your animals a simple category to group them!
