Group membership

farmOS includes an optional "Group asset" module, which adds a new Asset type called Group, as well as some organizational features that are unique to Group Assets.

A Group can have "members", which are other individual Assets. Group membership is tracked via "group assignment" Logs. This is very similar to the way that Location works for "movable" Assets. This means that an Asset's group membership can change, and the full history of its previous memberships is maintained in Logs.

A useful feature of Groups is that any Logs associated with the Group will also be associated with its member Assets.

A common use case for this is tracking "herds" of Animal assets. Each herd can be represented as a Group Asset, with Animal Assets assigned to it. Logs can be used to move the whole group, instead of referencing Animal Assets individually.

Notably, when the Group module is enabled, it overrides the Asset location logic to consider group membership. If the Asset is a member of a group, and the group has a movement Log that is more recent than any of the Asset's own movement Logs, then the Asset's location will be based on the group's Log.

Group membership logic

The logic for determining an Asset's group membership is as follows:

• Does the asset have a group assignment Log?
  • Yes: Does the group assignment Log reference groups?
    • Yes: groups referenced by the group assignment Log
    • No: no group
  • No: no group