I accidentally imported two CSV spreadsheets containing “Active Animals,” and the system created duplicates, which were manually removed.
To prevent occurrences like this, I suggest including a test that shouldn’t substantially alter how the system works today:
((new name = existing name) AND
(new birthdate = existing birthdate) AND
(new status = existing status) AND
(status = Active))
Welcome to the forum @ffrota! I think your logic makes sense. The way that something this is typically implemented is with a “field constraint” which is basically a way to attach logic to certain fields on entities (in this case the asset name field) with validation logic that can prevent “invalid” values from being saved (in this case a duplicate name).
The idea of preventing duplicate asset names has come up in the past, but farmOS hasn’t taken a strict opinion on it, so it was left up to user convention. But the “accidental” duplicate case you described is preventable so maybe there is good reason to consider something targeted like you describe.
Curious what others think…
(And there are more technical implementation questions to answer if we do decide to explore this… eg: is this for all asset types? only animals have birthdates. does each asset type need to define its own rules? should a site admin be able to disable this entirely? how do we handle cases where duplicate assets may already exist? etc…)