Cannot categorize assets with a taxonomy

Using farmOS
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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?

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Perhaps a dedicated “End Use” taxonomy for assets would be useful!

I’m a bit hesitant to add a general “Asset Category” taxonomy, but maybe? :slight_smile:

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Is this still your opinion?

Requests to have this kind of flexibility continue popping up. Is this something we could consider for v4.0?

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I’m not opposed, just hesitant. :slight_smile:

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.

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