search

bhutch29 / abv

Bar inventory tracking system
MIT License
6 stars 2 forks source link

Barcode clashes #122

Open ryanavella opened 5 years ago

ryanavella commented 5 years ago

We've observed at least 2 pairs of barcodes that clash with each other (so 4 total barcodes). So far, it seems that these shared barcodes are most common within a single brewery.

There are two questions worth asking here:

  1. Should we handle barcode clashes, or is this outside of the scope of ABV?
  2. How would we handle barcode clashes without making the bartender's job much more difficult?

Question 2 is particularly tricky because ABV can't determine which drink was intended without some form of user input. I don't see any solution other than keeping a list of troublesome barcodes, and presenting a popup every time one of them is encountered. This list of barcodes could be maintained either in the config file or in the sqlite database, but the popup seems non-optional.

ryanavella commented 5 years ago

So far, all of these clashes appear to be seasonal releases. For whatever reason (industry standard?), many breweries use the same barcode for all of their seasonal beers.

Once nice solution to the problem is to manually fix these entries in our database by renaming them "{brewery_name} (seasonal)" or "{brewery_name} (special)." That way it will always be accurate and doesn't require ABV to distinguish beers beyond just barcodes.