Variant description use case

I expected that adding a product (variant) in sale line would copy the description defined at variant level.

Why it is not?

And what is the use case of having a fillable description at variant level if Tryton is not using it itself out of the box?

We removed any such copy with issue6860 because data duplication is bad design and does not work well on multi-language environment.

Because a description is useful and quite common for example to display on a website.

You make assumption that the description in the sale must be the description in the product form.
This is an assumption Tryton can not do to be generalist. But if you want to display the product description on the sale order report, it is pretty easy to customize the report and get the description in the proper language.

Thank you for your response.

Why it would not be work well on multi-language environment?

The user may not have the same language as the customer so he can not edit it if needed.
But also it is quite complicated to know when to remove the content if the product change. It often leads to erasing user input by mistake.

The same will apply with no description at all in the sale line as the user does not know the customer language but I think it’s doalable to suppose that the person in charge of setting up the variant description knows what he is doing.

I don’t think so. If you change a product it is expected that its data (including its description) be changed.

I’m not comfortable discussing something yet worked and agreeded as I don’t pretend waste your time so excuse me in advance but I still try to understand the user rational behind this and I don’t find any reason a user can understand… (nor me…)

Not if you use the description as aditional information for the product. For example we have a product named “Training” and we use the description to detail on which days the training has been done.

If I change the product because the Type of training is diferent that the one initally selected I want to keep the description with the days done.

If you want to always show the product description on report, it’s easier to customize the template than copying data over diferent fields.

For me that is not the variant description else additional info as you said.

@ced advised me about this and it is done. I’ve been able to customize the report to show the description sale line or variant description if some of both exists.

Would you consider appropriate to propose this sale report behavior to the foundation module?

I think the most common case is to not put the description on the sale order.
And I do not think we should add a configuration option (always the less desirable solution) for such simple thing to do on the report. This is one of the reason we created relatorio based on OpenDocument. It allow basic users to customize it as they want.

I think I begin to get convinced…

Thanks for your time guys.