Use of Generic (Non-Organization Specific) Office Types

[Andrea Jans]

We have an open issue reported by users: Administrator Users are not seeing Office Types when creating an Office for an Organization. The Filter Options specifically include nothing when the user is an Administrator. In addition, for a normal user, the filter is for the Registered Organization, not the currently active organization. If the user is not an Administrator and does not have a Registered Organization, the Global Default Office Types are used.

I would like to discuss changing this to be the Active Organization, and refiltering when the Organization is changed.

[Andrea Jans]

Excerpt from another conversation on this topic:

The functional consequence of office types is the ability to filter offices, and maybe to differentiate representations (e.g. map markers) - and in either case org-specific types would cause more of a mess than being useful when used across organization records.

This is amplified by the fact that office types are largely congruent across organizations, so that in a multi-tenancy setting we would have mostly semantic duplicates, often even with the same names (e.g. each org would have their "head office" type) - plus the fact that you cannot tie any type-specific functionality to user-controlled types.

Each organization having the ability to control their own terminology here seems somewhat over the top - there seems to be no generic logic of any practical value in this - and as it is, this feature is only causing trouble.

So, as I see it, we should either remove the functionality for org-specific office types completely, or at least remove any default functionality for it (i.e., reduce it to a hidden organisation_id field in org_office_type) and then leave it to templates to implement specifics if they absolutely need to.

[Andrea Jans]

I do like the thought of making Office Types manageable only inside templates. Would we then remove the Office Type side menu items?

[Andrea Jans]

More on this conversation: 

A more plausible variant could be that organizations can choose which of the office types their users can choose from - which is equivalent to the ability to hide certain office types for users of a particular organization. This is more plausible because you would have each type only once, but some of them may not be used by all organizations.

That would, though, require a many-to-many relation between office types and organizations, and fairly complex filtering when generating the form widget - however, it would solve the Admin case, because there it would simply imply no filtering.

But still, I doubt that this has as much practical value as to justify the additional complexity by default - or, by consequence, the need to work around that complexity when you do not need it (which would be the majority of cases IMHO).

Thank you to Dominic for these and the prior excerpt thoughts.