Some locations on a farm are transitory or may change shape from season to season. To accommodate this fluid dynamic on a farm, users can retire locations that are no longer useful to them. Retiring a location is a “soft delete”, so the data and history about that location are not deleted. Instead, retiring a location makes it so that the user cannot access or associate items with that location. Specifically, retiring a location does the following:
Removes that location from the farm map
Removes that location from the possible location selection when creating a crop management plan
Removes that location from the possible locations selections when creating a task
Special considerations around retiring a location
Since crop management plans and tasks can be associated with locations, we need to take special care to ensure we don’t abandon these entities when retiring a location. Users cannot retire locations where any of the following conditions evaluate to true:
1+ tasks that are in “Planned” or “Late” status reference the location
1+ transplant tasks that are “Planned” or “Late” status reference the location in the to_location field*
1+ crop management plans that are “Planned” or “Active” status reference the location as its' current_location
If any of these conditions are true, the user will view an error message (see XXX) and be prevented from retiring the location until the appropriate conditions are met
* Transplant tasks are specifically called out based on their more complicated structure, but should fall under the first case as well.
Viewing historical locations
It’s reasonable that a user may want to view historical crop management plans or tasks associated with retired locations. As such, the read-only view for both “Completed” and “Abandoned” tasks will receive a special visual treatment to clarify that a location is retired, and hence won’t show up on the standard farm map view.
Forward looking
It is highly likely we’ll add a locations Listview in the future that will have different filters. One of these filters could be “Retired”, whereby users could view past locations.