Products should have relationship to ProductFamily

[montanajava]

In working group discussions it was decided that there should be no relationship of a respective product to the ProductFamily enumeration. The reason for that was because it was in once sense redundant: the name of the class of the product revealed the family.

That said, "software" has no way of knowing that -- without some form of intelligence.

This proposal is to add that relationship for all products (ManureRecycing, PlantProtection, and so on).

[AFoletti]

@montanajava could you please better specify what you meant (with an example if possible). Otherwise, this will be closed as "won't fix"

[montanajava]

The rationale for the change request is so that systems can explicitly, not implicitly, know to what productFamily a product belongs. This allows for filtering. Use cases include UIs allowing users to filter products by family, and systems that want to filter out certain families of products from consideration in any number of contexts. A branch https://github.com/blw-ofag-ufag/eCH-0263/tree/42-referenceProductFamily has been created as an example of how it could be implemented.

[AFoletti]

Thanks for the explanatin and the example. I now understand better what you mean.
However, this means mixing two different modeling choices: "productType" as discinct classes (one for each Type, as it is today) and a general class, where the productType is given thanks to a codelist.
Mixing the two approaches is in my opinion wrong and redundant.
As you say in the initial post, the type of product is given by the class of said product. Being an instance of a class is the most clear way to say "I am exactly this thing" and every application should be able to handle that (or stop trying to handle structured data).

However...
You are right, "substanceType" does not make any reference to actual instances of the various "ProductType", but only to an enumerated type.
A better way to solve this would be, in my opinion, to get rid of the "productFamilyType" as enumerated type and transform the productType relationship to a proper reference (via ID) to an instance of one of the many defined "productType" classes.

[montanajava]

Agreed. This issue was created under a false premise of lists of products of multiple families being unified into one list. At least in the case of one well-known active BLW project, that has turned out to be not the case. In that project within the GUI, products of divergent families are, in fact, separated into separate tabs. I withdraw this proposal and support your position of closing this with "won't fix". Sorry for the run-around.

As to your second paragraph, I would recommend a new issue for that.

[AFoletti]

All right! Thanks for the discussion. Even if we go in another direction, you raised an important issue.

I will close this one and delete your branch.
As you suggested, there is a new ticket up for discussion: #61