Bryan and I had a good work session. We were working on sub inventory searches and results for invoices. Currently, the code allows for searching of sub inventory by a single part/item category. That keeps all of the sub attributes lined up and programmatically readable. The new challenge is allowing sub inventory searches on any and all categories at the same time. This has a number of challenges.

For example: Each category could potentially have the same sub attribute name (the id's are different but the names are the same). All sub attributes are setup on a per category basis. The different categories could potentially assign different data types to the different sub attributes. The known data types are numbers, text entries, and dates. All of that data is stored in different tables based on the data types. Say that each item category has a sub attribute called "Batch Number". If I have 5 categories with batch number as an attribute, they don't want to see 5 different filters, they want to see one filter (a grouping) of that sub attribute. This gets into a deeper problem of pulling the data back out because technically, the data is stored based off of id numbers and column numbers (order within a category). All of those could be different. It becomes a mixed bag.

Anyways, this was our challenge today. We had a good work session and made a list of to do items to help guide us along the way.