Collections - Manage Multiple Inventories, Collaborate, and More!

[tonyaellie]

We want your input on a new way of managing multiple seperate inventories: Collections!

This new functionality will transform how you use HomeBox by allowing you to create and manage multiple, distinct inventories. Beyond just having more than one inventory, Collections introduces robust collaboration capabilities, enabling you to share inventories with others and define their access levels.

The planned roles are

Role	What They Can Do
Owner	Everything: view, create, edit, delete any item/location/label; manage users, settings, and backups. Full control.
Admin	Almost everything: view, create, edit, delete any item/location/label; manage users (except owner) and settings. Cannot delete owner or transfer ownership.
Editor	Add and manage items. Can also manage (create/edit/delete) all labels.
Viewer	Only view content. Cannot create, edit, or delete anything.

Your Feedback is Essential!
As this feature is still being designed and everything is subject to change (including names and UIs), we are eager to gather your input. Please pay special attention to:

• The location of the collection switcher: Do you prefer it in the tobar or sidebar?
  • The tobar
    
    
  • The sidebar
    
• The switcher, does it show everything you would expect, do you like the design
  
• The name "Collections": Does this name make sense? Are there other names you'd suggest that better describe the functionality?
• Overall UI and User Experience: Any initial thoughts on the visual design, flow, or functionality presented in the screenshots?

If you have any other feedback on collections we would love to hear it!

[agryson]

I like the idea but need to think about the differences between this and just being able to assign such roles to locations and their child locations.

Sidebar is best IMO as I'd imagine it's a one time thing per session to get into the context of a collection, top bar for me is for frequently accessed stuff like search/home.

There may need to be a certain granularity between editor and viewer, i.e. some fields can be edited but not others, so my wife could be a viewer on a workshop collection but if she takes some batteries for example to be able to change the quantity (but not be able to add or remove whole assets)

[WhiteSockedDancer]

I would also ask, how is this working with locations:

If i have two collections (e.g. Home Office and Family Home). Could i have items from both collections in the same location and if i'm not allowed to see one i just see items from the other collection at the shared location? Or will Locations itself be associated with a collection?

Are Collections separate databases with their own locations and items and every item/location can just be in one collection? In this case just adding permissions to locations and/or Items would enable "Collections" on a more flexible way (Then you could just create Tier1 locations named "Home Office and "Family Home" for example).

[agryson]

My thoughts too, I still grapple with what this adds versus applying roles to locations.

And you bring up lots of good points about the potential complexity it brings (for what strikes me as a niche case for a Home Inventory, I trust my family, why do I need RBAC?)

[tankerkiller125]

"Collections" is basically the groups that already exist within Homebox. I think Collections might be a bad name for it honestly. I'd consider it more of a "tenant" based system. Say for example, you host Homebox for yourself, and you have a brother or something that also wants inventory they could register and have they're own group, and so forth so on. And lets say your family had a shared cabin or something, you could have a group for that and share that amongst the people who have their own separate group.

So you might see "My Home" and "Family Cabin", while your brother would see "Brother Home" and "Family Cabin" and so forth so on. Homebox already has tenancy built in (which is why registering without an invite link results in a completely separate inventory) but currently a user can only be part of one tenant. Our goal is to change that so that users can be part of multiple tenants and choose which one they want to work in.

The items and locations of each tenant are separate, and would likely remain that way.

[agryson]

Thanks, that clears things up for me and I can better see some use cases for that.
Probably not something I'd use myself but would be nice to have the option.

[WhiteSockedDancer]

"Collections" is basically the groups that already exist within Homebox. I think Collections might be a bad name for it honestly. I'd consider it more of a "tenant" based system. Say for example, you host Homebox for yourself, and you have a brother or something that also wants inventory they could register and have they're own group, and so forth so on. And lets say your family had a shared cabin or something, you could have a group for that and share that amongst the people who have their own separate group.

So you might see "My Home" and "Family Cabin", while your brother would see "Brother Home" and "Family Cabin" and so forth so on. Homebox already has tenancy built in (which is why registering without an invite link results in a completely separate inventory) but currently a user can only be part of one tenant. Our goal is to change that so that users can be part of multiple tenants and choose which one they want to work in.

The items and locations of each tenant are separate, and would likely remain that way.

I prefer "collection" over "tenant". I think "collection" is more generic for different usecases.
The goal of allowing users to be part of multiple collections seems to be the key aspect of this feature, else we could just host individual docker containers for each collection.

[WhiteSockedDancer]

What about labels? Will labels be shared between collections?

[tonyaellie]

No, the idea is that each collection would be similar to if you created a new account.

[WhiteSockedDancer]

What about the search functionality? I would love it to have a filter for collections in the search so we can search in all collections at once but could also filter by collection, location, label, ...

I see a usual usecase of looking for a tool and finding it even in another collection would be nice. The alternative is to do a search in every collection.

[idelsink]

Why not call inventories... inventories? It's pretty distinct in what it is intended to do. But why can it not be a location?

There is already the concept of nested locations, so why can the top most collection/inventory not just be a location? This can then also be shared. Perhaps there should not even be a distinction between what level of location we're talking about and you can just share locations. Be it the top-most level, or the bottom level. All of the sub-locations would then inherit (or not) from the shared location.

Btw, thanks for taking care of Homebox! Pretty nice piece of software!

[tankerkiller125]

Homebox already has "groups" (being called collections or tenants here) which are entirely separate and independent. They are not locations, items, etc. and we intend to keep them separate both for simplicity sake, and for potential future things we're looking to cook up to make Homebox even more flexible.