Document Library: initial specifications and scoping work

[aislinnpearson]

Following several requests from Helen to be able to either add or link to documents in FarmOS (e.g. our rural payments agreement, habitat reports, etc) as well as use cases like the below from our Trials Manager we agreed to look into the idea of creating a document library where this is (maybe) a specific entity type that can:

(1) reference one or more uploads and/or links (e.g. where a habitat report has more than one file associated with it, e.g. the report, the appendices and the geometry). (2) be referenced by different entities (e.g. plans, logs, equipment if a user manual, etc)

Related issues in FarmOS Core: https://farmos.discourse.group/t/managing-documents-sops-etc/1857 https://farmos.discourse.group/t/experimenting-with-a-document-asset-type/1894

Case study submitted by our Trials Manager:

When we do the experiments, the trials team often add data to those experiments (mainly yields, but sometimes observations and other tests). That data doesn’t get stored in FarmOS – the format is too varied. Instead what we would like to do is link to the data on the plan.

So far the process we have come up with is:

1. Collect data in the field
2. Add a harvest form when back in the office (usually a combine harvest) – see example here: https://rothamstedfarm.farmos.net/log/8998
3. Navigate back to the proposal
4. Link to the data file on the Plan (see here for the example linked to the above harvest form – image below) https://rothamstedfarm.farmos.net/plan/131

This process is a bit clunky for the farm team – it is a lot of steps – but for the scientists it really helps to have a specific place to look for all the data we produce related to their experiments.

I’d like to come up with a broader process that works with all data, not just the harvest data – preferably something we can use for a variety of data, not just harvest data.

[aislinnpearson]

A nice example I have seen on how to manage documents from Research Space, where each document comes with a "permalink" that can be referenced elsewhere in the software, but always refers back to the original document. Following on with our discussion and @paul121's comment about being able to view 'related' assets/ logs/ entities linked to each document, that would really be essential here because the one place that this goes wrong is if you edit this one document, that edit is reflected in all the places you referenced it (the revision history might be a useful way of capturing this).

In RSpace you can also filter by document types. The above is images, the below is documents (including PowerPoint). Maybe not relevant to our implementation where filtering by document categories might be more relevant, but still a nice feature.

[aislinnpearson]

Another case study related to this:

We have an issue here were people take pictures on their phones but enter their records on their computers. This makes sending the pictures from your phone to the computer really tricky - especially when the systems aren't integrated (personal phone, work laptop). You basically have to e-mail or whatsapp yourself the picture, save it and then attach it to the log you are creating.

What would be great is if there is a way to take pictures in FarmOS and store them as a specific file type in an image library, so that when you get back to your desk you can search the image library and attach the photographs from the library to the log/ asset. Ideally this would be a nice easy 'one button' option if that kind of widget is available. This functionality would have multiple uses for us: not only pictures for observation records, but also photographing seed labels, pesticide labels, etc and then being able o access those pictures when creating logs.

The other thing that would be handy is to explicitly save the timestamp and georeferenced in the image so you could view the images in time and in space.