Best practice? Temporary deactivating "list members"

Support Developer
1

I’m currently implementing a module which collects Things into (sorted) Lists using a n-to-m relationship ListOfThing. (Imagine checklists of things you want to pack for different travel cases.)

Now for some reason I want to temporary remove (suspend) one Thing from all Lists, but easily add it back at the same position later again. (Imagine: your red shoes are broken, so I can’t pack them into any of your travel cases until they get repaired.)

Also: When showing the suspended Thing, I would like to see the Lists it is listed on. And when viewing the Lists, I would like to see the suspended Thing (as being suspended).

Anyway, when printing (a report on List), I’d like to skip the suspended Things without any further effort. (Which is why I come up with active).

What is best practice for this?

  • Is it a good idea to use Thing.active and tweak the ListOfThing’s search_active() to return all Things, no matter whether they are active or not?
  • Is it better to add some suspended flag to Thing?
  • Can a tree view be asked to show both active an inactive elements?
2

I would use a One2Many to an third object that would keep the status of Thing and either have this status as a computed field on the value of a field on Thing or having a process to update all the status in the third object for a specific Thing.

Moreover what you describe as a n-to-m relationship requires already a third object anyway. And using a O2M would allow people to easily reorder the list also.