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It's been pointed out that the 5-level hierarchy is really a
simplification of a much deeper hierarchy implicit in the data. A richer
version of the hierarchy would distinguish "Drawers" from "Aisles" and "Crates" in the
way that "Sites" and "Rooms" are distinguished in the current schema
(Michael's working on a 19 level hierarchy that captures this).
Further evaluation will inform us whether a more
thorough repartitioning of the existing data representation would be
helpful, but at the moment no requirement for this modification has been specified.
CSpace supports the representation of hierarchical locations via BT/NT
relationships, and at least at first glance this might be the way to
implement the Location Authority's hierarchy, though thought and effort will be required
to make this work in the UI.
In principletheory, it would be appropriate to generate Display Names via a principled an algorithmic (and reversible)
concatenation of the locations path in the hierarchy. In this case, the Display Name key would be locked and not directly
editable – -- editing would be done on the underlying hierarchy. This would also make it possible to
support the "crate movement functionality". Caution would be needed in permitting editing, as a change to
an upper level of the hierarchy would render all the barcodes for locations beneath that level unrecognizable.
This would seem to dictate that the values for nodes in the hierarchy have an attribute (perhaps "immutable")
for locations that could not or would not change (e.g. "buildings", or "aisles").
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