Planting quickform ideas

[gbathree]

Another thing I notice is that the way the quickform generates the planting name is it appends the field name with the crop type and year which is great, but it creates very long names. Most lists show both the field and the planting, so having the field name duplicated is unnecessary and further, because of the use of elipsis in the application, you can often fail to see the planting name at all if the field name is too long.

I main reason I see to add all this information to the planting name is for text search in the dropdowns… because you often need to know the field name and planting name to get the planting you want (otherwise, if you search ‘raspberries’ you’re going to get 5 plantings.

So I’d propose two things and I think you’d have to do them together:

1. Stop appending the field name to the planting name in the planting quickform. It clutters the tables and, with current ellipses, causes the key planting information to not be visible in normal tables.
2. As an extra help, in all tables show the full item name on hover. That way, even plantings (or anything else) with long names can be quickly clarified without having the click into the item to see the full name.
3. For dropdown selectors (esp. in planting quickform but maybe this applies elsewhere), always text search the planting and field names… so if I search ‘north raspberries’ in a list of plantings, it searches both the planting and the field names to get me the planting object called ‘2019 raspberries’ with associated field "north field’.
4. I would also propose that in the quickform field dropdown list, whenever you show a planting you should also show the field afterwards, like this (or similar).

• 2019 raspberries (north field)

I recognize this is all a little more custom in some ways but it was the main issue I had when using the planting quickform.

This may also be true of other types of assets linked to fields, structures, etc. Not sure but worth considering.

PS I’m back into using the Touchstone FarmOS instance and really enjoying just using it. Really appreciating the planting quickform also - very helpful! Excited to populate this instance and share it with the community!

[mstenta]

Thanks for the ideas @gbathree! I’ve been using the Planting quick form a bunch myself this month (Happy Spring! ) and have been thinking about lots of next steps too.

I’ve also been using it in combination with the (alpha) Crop Plan module - it’s definitely too tedious for general use, but it’s really nice to have the visualization of the season. The Planting quick form is loosely tied in to the process: the Crop Plan offers a link to it so you can create the Plant asset + Seeding/Transplant logs, then brings you back to fill in Plan-specific details (days to transplant/maturity + days of harvest). Very tedious still, but serves to inspire lots of ideas while using it! I might start a thread to organize them soon.

As for your feedback, here are some thoughts…

@gbathree

Stop appending the field name to the planting name in the planting quickform.

Maybe you noticed this already, but the Planting quick form does offer the ability to modify the Plant asset name before it’s saved. Here is what it looks like:

I often find myself overriding that and removing the location name too (like you describe), because I don’t need to differentiate the same plant type across multiple locations. Some people do, though, which is why the default is [Season] [Location] [Crop].

I’m not sure we should change that, BUT I have definitely thought about making that default pattern configurable per instance. Then you would be able to set it to something like [Season] [Crop] (omitting [Location]), and you wouldn’t need to manually override it each time.

Do you think that would be enough to meet your needs?

@gbathree

As an extra help, in all tables show the full item name on hover.

Agree! I actually had this same thought the other day. We should absolutely implement this.

@gbathree

For dropdown selectors (esp. in planting quickform but maybe this applies elsewhere), always text search the planting and field names…
…
in the quickform field dropdown list, whenever you show a planting you should also show the field afterwards

These are good ideas too. I’ve been wanting to overhauls the “autocomplete search” widget for a long time, so maybe we can take these into consideration at the same time. This probably deserves a dedicated topic.

The second idea (tacking on additional info in certain places) gets tricky because: what if it’s already included in the name? Then you end up with “2019 north field raspberries (north field)”.

If we take that idea to it’s logical conclusion, you start to ask if we should have asset names at all, or if they should be auto-generated based on attributes everywhere instead. But then we will have different users with different needs, and different contexts within a single farm, etc etc, and I think we come full circle back around to what we have now: a free form asset name field.

Generally speaking, I do think it’s important to have as much information in the asset name as is necessary to identify it and distinguish it at a glance. So, if you have “Corn” in “North field” and “South field” during “2025” you really should name your plant assets “2025 North field Corn” and “2025 South field Corn”. Or if you plant 10 successions of Red lettuce, you should have “2025 Red lettuce succession 1”, “2025 Red lettuce succession 2”, “2025 Red lettuce succession 3”, etc (I’d love to see the Planting quick form support succession creation at some point… or maybe that’s a Crop plan feature ).

It does mean that the standard lists (with “Name”, “Location”, and “Plant type” columns) become somewhat cluttered with duplicate info, but it’s hard for us to predict when that will be an issue. Side note: we’ve been talking about making the listing page columns more configurable, so you can show/hide certain ones in certain contexts. That might help with “duplicate info” in contexts where that’s an issue.

It feels to me like we can do a lot more with UI and quick form configurability to ease these pain points.

[gbathree]

Thanks for the response.

The second idea (tacking on additional info in certain places) gets tricky because: what if it’s already included in the name? Then you end up with “2019 north field raspberries (north field)”.

I think this is a question of what’s the most reasonable default basically. I think IF dropdown search included by default location name, then the default would more reasonably not include the field. The result is 1) you have cleaner plant asset names and tables and 2) you get better searchability. So basically yeah I think these items should be paired to get to a better default experience.

In short – I think two issues are linked (and should probably if they are posted as requests be linked there too).

That said - the hover alone will help!

I’d love to try the planning features as well if possible - is that possible to get installed on my touchstone.farmos.net instance?

[mstenta]

@gbathree

The result is 1) you have cleaner plant asset names and tables

What would an ideal plant name be, in your case? I ask because I suspect this may vary a lot from farm to farm.

And consider this: if you had the ability to turn off the “Name” column in your “Plant assets” page, so you only saw “Location”, “Season”, and “Plant Type” - would that work?

Perhaps combined with the ability to configure the default plant name pattern that the Planting quick form uses, you could accomplish the “clean asset names and tables” in your instance.

And yes, maybe this could be the “default” behavior. Or it could be one potential default that a farmOS Setup Wizard gives you, after asking questions about the scale of your operation perhaps.

@gbathree

and 2) you get better searchability

I’d love to tackle the “searchability” problem space as a whole, since there are a lot of places where we could improve that. The Autocomplete entity reference dropdowns are one (critical) place. We currently use default Drupal widgets for the autocompletes, and the Entity Browser module for more complex search capabilities. I have a lot of complaints with both of them, so I’m inclined to take a step back and try to tackle it all together.

This also deserves it’s own forum topic…

[mstenta]

@gbathree

I’d love to try the planning features as well if possible - is that possible to get installed on my touchstone.farmos.net instance?

Yes! I’ll make a note to deploy it to your instance along with farmOS 3.4.4, which I’m hoping to release this week.

[gbathree]

And consider this: if you had the ability to turn off the “Name” column in your “Plant assets” page, so you only saw “Location”, “Season”, and “Plant Type” - would that work?

Yes, I think that could work. That’s definitely true, flexibility in the tables could address this.

[nununo]

Hi Mike,

@mstenta

I often find myself overriding that and removing the location name too (like you describe), because I don’t need to differentiate the same plant type across multiple locations. Some people do, though, which is why the default is [Season] [Location] [Crop].

I’m not sure we should change that, BUT I have definitely thought about making that default pattern configurable per instance. Then you would be able to set it to something like [Season] [Crop] (omitting [Location]), and you wouldn’t need to manually override it each time.

Do you think that would be enough to meet your needs?

I’d love this. I would like to be able to customise my (self-hosted) instance to have only [Season] [Crop].

Thanks!