Packstack-Tech/packstack

Proposal: Add quantity field to Inventory items

Callisto13 opened this issue · 4 comments

Callisto13 commented

From user request in Slack.

This is currently just a proposal and may get voted down. Discussion is ongoing, please comment and edit as you like.

Adding a Quantity field on Inventory items would let users keep track of how much they have of each piece of gear.

This has the potential to be at odds with the equivalent Quantity field in Packs. A way to make the two integrate would be to change the way users currently set Quantity on Pack items: instead of allowing users to set any number, they can set the Quantity based on that which they have in their Inventory (defaults to all?).

Potential problems / Things to think about:

  1. Does this mean the that the Quantity field on Inventory items is mandatory? We could default to 1, then make the Pack quantity based on what they have in the Inventory (and not increment-able beyond that).
  2. ... following the above note: I feel we would have to pick one or the other. Having the Pack item Quantity be selectively 100% configurable (as in unrelated to Inventory Quantity) makes the other feature pointless, and vice-versa. Keeping both behaviours together feels really weird to me, and I can imagine it leading to a cluttered UX.
  3. How does this affect current Packs? Would we have to do some sort of migration, and set the current Quantity from each Pack item as the Quantity on the corresponding Inventory item? nope there are more than 1 packs :p
Callisto13 commented

Alternative UX:

  • Set quantity on Inventory Item
  • Add item to Pack, setting quantity to whatever number
  • If PackItem Quantity > InventoryItem Quantity, something indicates that you don't actually have all the gear you need (maybe a small icon which changes colour based on condition, with a tooltip hover. oh or maybe the 1 x at the beginning of each item line can be red or something?)

Still need to think about existing packs/inventories. Presumably we will default inventory quantity to 1, so will it be annoying if all pack items suddenyl complain you don't have enough stuff?

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Callisto13 commented

This also only makes sense for items which would be grouped in sets. Like you would never set "Big Agnes Copper Spur Tent x 2". Does that make it weird? Maybe it is okay?

Callisto13 commented

(maybe a small icon which changes colour based on condition, with a tooltip hover. oh or maybe the 1 x at the beginning of each item line can be red or something?)

Thinking about this, it probably only makes sense to show this in Pack edit mode. Packs can be public and therefore sharable, and other people either will be confused by what it means, or may not care about the state of your Inventory quantities.

Deleted user commented

On one hand, I get it. But it would potentially conflict with other feature requests. I had an idea to add usage stats to inventory items - mileage, # of liters filtered, # of nights used, etc... If you have a group of things - tent stakes - what if you own 12 but only pack 6? Which get assigned the usage? What if you own 4 filters, but only use 1 per trip? Maybe I'm overthinking this, but throwing it out there.