Hello,
I have recently discovered farmOS and have been having a go at setting it up for our farm (2.0.0-beta2). It definitely beats digging through everyone’s diaries looking for something :).
Some of the animals and equipment on the property are owned by neighbours and I would like to keep a record of who owns what and where it is. To do this, I have made a user account for each person (even if they never log in) and added a custom field containing a reference to a user as the owner for the animal and equipment assets. This seems to work well, however I can’t work out how (or not sure if it is currently possible or requires modifying the php code) to make this field appear in the list of all animal or equipment assets. i.e. Show and allow filtering by the owner in the /assets/animal page. Being able to filter by a custom field would also be handy - for example finding all animals belonging to someone.
Whilst on the topic of views for assets, it appears farmOS v1 had support for filtering by a range of birth dates . Does farmOS v2 have this or something similar or is this still a todo?
Thanks everyone for your efforts in writing what is some very useful software.
To do this, I have made a user account for each person (even if they never log in) and added a custom field containing a reference to a user as the owner for the animal and equipment assets.
Sounds like you’re digging right in! Great!
This seems to work well, however I can’t work out how (or not sure if it is currently possible or requires modifying the php code) to make this field appear in the list of all animal or equipment assets.
I assume you did this by enabling the Field UI module and creating a new field via “Administration > Structure > Asset types”? This is one way to add fields to asset/log types. It is very flexible, but has some limitations/considerations (which you have discovered).
Fields can also be added via a custom module: Fields | farmOS
The benefit of this approach (custom module) is that farmOS will automatically add these as columns+filters to the default Views configurations (eg: /assets/animals). We have some “smart” logic to wire all this up for you. The intention was to make exactly your use-case easier.
Adding fields created via Field UI to these Views is also possible, but requires overriding more configuration, and in general I would not recommend it. Creating a custom module is easy (explained here) and makes it easier to maintain your customizations moving forward (eg: via Git).
Also, for reference, we have an old feature request open for “Asset ownership” here: https://www.drupal.org/project/farm/issues/2400065 - feel free to share your notes/experimentation details there (or open a dedicated forum topic and we can cross-link them) - maybe we can move towards making this an official feature of farmOS!
Whilst on the topic of views for assets, it appears farmOS v1 had support for filtering by a range of birth dates . Does farmOS v2 have this or something similar or is this still a todo?
If you (or anyone) is interested in undertaking this, I’d be happy to review a pull request and/or point in the right direction… just needs some dev time.
Thanks for the pointers.
I was using the Field UI module. In the end I made a custom module for ownership based off the Fields | farmOS bundle documentation you linked. As a beginner with drupal, it may be useful to put a note on there at some point to say they given code should be pasted in the [modulename].module file, although I managed to skip over reading this in the main modules page, so it will probably be more obvious to others :).
For anyone attempting to do similar things, it may also be useful to look at the soure code for the field definitions to get the available options and data types. If it would be helpful, I can have a go at submitting a pull request to add this to the documentation.
I will have more of a look at the feature request and date range when I have time and are a little more familiar with the code base / structure.
It would be easy enough for farmOS core to provide this field. But I realized this could create a conflict with your custom module in the future if you create a field with the same name.
Would you like to open a PR to add the field to farmOS core in that module, instead of doing it in your own module?
We discussed a few of the considerations around “asset ownership” more generally on the call as well… I will put a few notes in the issue: Asset ownership [#2400065] | Drupal.org
I did make a custom module, but haven’t gotten around to publishing it (implementation is almost exactly the same as the logs ownership, with label being 'Owner(s)' and description being 'Who owns this asset.'). It’s field name is farm_owners, so hopefully shouldn’t cause too many conflicts. Entering stuff in from scratch wouldn’t take long, especially if there is a batch assign feature added like there currently is for the logs.
I am happy to create a pull request to add it in, probably following direction 1 in your notes (making it an assignment to, keeping the same wording as the logs rather than ownership of). A legal_ownership field could be added later or as a custom module (potentially this module would handle lease agreements as well) if needed, although direction 1 would be good enough for us.
Hello,
I’ve got a development environment set up and am working in this branch. I have changed the if ($entity_type->id() == 'log') { line in farm_owner.module to if ($entity_type->id() == 'log' || $entity_type->id() == 'asset') { and and reinstalled farmOS, While assets now have an owner field, this does not show up in any of the views of assets. Is there something else that needs to be done for the field to show up or am I doing something wrong?
I had a similar experience with writing my own module, but found using a bundle field rather than a base field allowed ithe field to appear in views for each asset type and temporarily used that instead.
The “right” way to do that is to edit the View through the Drupal UI (enable the views_ui module and go to /admin/structure/views/view/farm_asset), then export the YML and commit that (enable the “Configuration Manager” module and go to /admin/config/development/configuration/single/export/view/farm_asset to get the YML).
Be sure to stick to the same patterns/conventions when you add the new column via the Views UI (look to other asset reference fields for an example), and be thoughtful about where that field is organized among the columns - maybe after the “Parents” column?
Thanks for the instructions. I have gotten that part working.
I think the next step is to get the bulk assign owners working like in the logs. I have had a look at the code and am thinking that the plugin in the owner module would need to be restructured a bit to be more like that in the flag module to cope with multiple entity types. Is this the case or is there a simpler method that I am missing? I have had a small attempt at the rearranging on my local copy, but seem to have created a moderate mess and need to go and do a bit more reading up how it is meant to work before trying again :). If this is painfully obvious or this feature is needed in a hurry, anybody feel free to have a go. Otherwise, I can keep having a look when I have a chance.
The routing config can be refactored to provide two paths: /log/assign and /asset/assign, and provide an additional argument to the LogAssignActionForm to define the entity type (asset or log). That should take care of the form.
@jgOhYeah Another thought just came to mind… In the /people page, we have a column “Assigned logs”. It probably makes sense for there to be another column for “Assigned assets” alongside this new asset owner field.
Thanks for the instructions and hints. I thought of this too and had a go at making this work using the views ui and copying the settings from the assigned logs button, although I forgot I had done it to mention it .
Hello again,
Apologies it has taken so long, but I think I have got everything working for adding assign users to assets… when installing from scratch. This is pretty much along the lines of the changes you suggested.
I have attempted to write an update hook to add the changes required. The update.php file crashes, but seems to install the updates ok with drush (drush updatedb). Everything then works except that the bulk assign assets option doesn’t appear.
I have been simulating updating by starting from beta 4 and entering some example data, before checking out the branch I have been working in. The update . I also tried to update from beta 2 to this branch on our production system with the same results.
The error (useful part) from running update.php:
[Mon Apr 25 01:17:38.167000 2022] [php7:notice] [pid 14117] [client 192.168.0.186:60250] Uncaught PHP Exception Drupal\\Core\\Entity\\Sql\\SqlContentEntityStorageException: "Table information not available for the 'owner' field." at /var/www/html/farmOS/web/core/lib/Drupal/Core/Entity/Sql/DefaultTableMapping.php line 391
Does anyone know or can give hints on what I am doing wrong or what I should be doing to get this working? Thanks for your help.
That config entity gets created automatically when the module is installed. But for existing installations you will need to create it via your update hook.
I think it would look like this (untested):
use Drupal\system\Entity\Action;
...
/**
* Add 'owner' field to assets.
*/
function farm_owner_update_9001() {
// ... your other code
// Create action for assigning assets to users.
$action = Action::create([
'id' => 'asset_assign_action',
'label' => t('Assign asset'),
'type' => 'asset',
'plugin' => 'asset_assign_action',
'configuration' => [],
]);
$action->save();
}
Post-update hooks run after other update hooks, and have a few other important differences (see doc link above for more info). Notably, they have a full Drupal bootstrap available to them, whereas some things are not possible in hook_update_N(). So maybe creating field definitions in this way (perhaps also specifically using the farm_field.factory service like this) is not possible in hook_update_N().
In either case, I’m starting to use post update hooks myself more often, so it would probably be best to move to that anyway. Let’s see if that solves this…
Sorry it has taken a while to get back - had a few assignments / tasks needing doing.
The update code was based off the Drupal examples and documentation. I can’t find the exact page, but this example is pretty similar to what I based it off.
I pasted this into the update hook and the assign action does appear and work for assets when running through drush.
Ta for linking that - make a bit more sense of what to aim for. farm_owner.install has been updated to be fairly similar in structure to the example you gave and renamed to farm_owner.post_update.php to match just in case. This works with drush, but still no luck with update.php.
Issue potentially found
I was about to add a few observations and press send, but then I happened to come across what I think is related or is the cause.
Line 17 in farm_owner.module causes the crash if || $entity_type->id() == 'asset' is present. If commented out so that the line is just if ($entity_type->id() == 'log') {, update.php is happy, although the owner field isn’t added to assets. Do you know of a workaround for this or is this likely a wild goose chase and the issue lies elsewhere? Thanks.
