Resizing Beds from Bed Generator

Can beds that are generated from the bed generator be resized if the parent needs to change? Without having to individually resize each individual one?

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Unfortunately, no. :frowning:

The bed generator is pretty simple: it just creates the beds, but it doesn’t maintain any link to them (or to the parent area) after that. So you can’t “load” the areas back into the generator to work with them again. This would be a great next step for the tool, though.

Personally, I have been thinking about a slightly different solution to this problem: allowing areas to be “archived”. In other words, instead of changing their shape, you would archive the old areas and generate new ones. This is not possible with areas right now, but it is possible with assets. So my plan is to convert “areas” to types of “assets” in the future… which would bring together the code for managing them so they have the same capabilities.

Here is the issue for that: https://www.drupal.org/project/farm/issues/2363393

In the meantime, there isn’t a super easy way to resize generated beds in farmOS.

Out of curiosity, what kind of resizing are you looking at? Just making the beds longer? Or making them longer AND wider? Or adding beds perhaps? Combination?

Thanks @mstenta. Its a little of both I am trying to do. My bed layout on the map was originally an estimate as the plot was not on satellite view. I am just being a little pedantic and getting the plots to match the map. So that I can get a better idea of space as I plan future plots.

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Worth mentioning: we’re working on some updates to the mapping features which might make it easier to “walk your field boundary” and draw a polygon at the same time. This will help in cases where the satellite imagery is outdated, making it hard to draw fields purely by looking at the map. Of course, GPS on phones has it’s limitations too - but it will be another option.

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You could also potentially use a tool I’ve been working on (shameless plug) farm-os-area-feature-proxy to created/manipulate the areas via GIS tools like QGIS.

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Thanks for pointing to that @Symbioquine! It’s a really useful tool for advanced area management.

I wonder: does QGIS have any built-in features for auto-generating parallel beds like this already? It would be nice if we didn’t have to maintain our own code for that - although it is nice that it’s directly in farmOS and doesn’t require setting up another system, which might be one step too many for a lot of folks who just need some beds drawn quick.

This looks very interesting. Can this proxy be “turned” on and off easily?
Like can the adjustments be made and then applied to the normal farmOS?

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@mstenta I am looking forward to these new mapping features.
A external GPS antenna might be very helpful to be more precise. Are you aware of any cheap ones?

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@mstenta There are many ways one could use QGIS to generate different patterns of polygons - some that I’ve played with include the built-in geoprocessing tools, plugins, and custom python scripts leveraging the QGis APIs. However, I think the most user-friendly is just using the built-in snapping/digitalization tooling;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avwWeRJQBpY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avwWeRJQBpY

@Lars Yes, the proxy is separate from farmOS and has no data storage of its own. If you used it to create/edit farmOS areas, those changes are made to the data stored in farmOS and the proxy could be shut down and wouldn’t be needed again unless you desired its capabilities for future area changes.

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@Symbioquine this looks really good I have to try to implement this

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I don’t have a great lay of the land when it comes to GPS hardware, unfortunately. Maybe someone else here on the forum does. Could start a dedicated forum topic!

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I am guessing that Fields and Beds are similar and that there is no easy way to resize Fields either? I am just getting started with FarmOS and entering in my fields, but invariably never end up with the exact same acreage as the FSA maps. I haven’t found anyway to nudge the field boundary lines once they are created in order to tweak the total acres. If there is a method for resizing Fields, please pass it along.

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@ctomayer - It is possible to resize areas individually, Fields and Beds included. The issue described above is specifically with regard to using the Bed Generator to resize beds in bulk, which is not possible. But any area in farmOS can be edited and its geometry can be adjusted manually.

To do so: click on the Areas menu, then click on the name of the area you want to edit. Click the Edit tab at the top and scroll down to the Geometry field. You will see some editing buttons on the left of the map. The two bottom ones are for modifying and moving shapes. Click the modify one, then click on the shape you want to edit, and then you can click and drag individual vertices to change the area’s shape.

Hope that helps!

Perfect! Worked like a charm, thank you!
The only suggestion I have was that I noticed that the farther I zoomed in, the easier it was to adjust the vertices due to the granularity of the movements. When I zoomed in, the acreage indicator/display stayed in the center of the area, so I had to constantly adjust, pan to the center and see the effect the movement had on the acreage value, pan back to the area I was adjusting, move some more, pan back to the acreage indicator, etc, etc. How difficult would it be to keep the acreage indicator within the Areas current view?

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Great!

How difficult would it be to keep the acreage indicator within the Areas current view?

If you’d like to open a feature request, the code for that logic is in the farmOS-map repository: GitHub - farmOS/farmOS-map: farmOS-map is an OpenLayers wrapper library designed for agricultural mapping needs. It can be used in any project that has similar requirements.

Maybe someone will want to give it a try. Currently the positioning of the measurement is simply the centroid of a polygon or the end of a line segment: https://github.com/farmOS/farmOS-map/blob/a101a3e6c55ba857205e4b645742cc6bf4f706fa/src/behavior/measure.js#L45-L50