Next serial number question

[gunstr]

In the past the next serial number has been assigned in sequence for a part across revisions. I do not know when that stopped working but now I have noticed that the serial number starts over at 1 for a new revision. Is that change intentional and is there any setting or other method to go back to the previous logic?

I cannot open the demo site right now so I have not verified the behavior there.

[SchrodingersGat]

@gunstr that's strange, certainly not intended behavior. Can you please provide some screenshots or other examples of this?

BTW the demo site is up again, perhaps you can try to reproduce there?

[gunstr]

@SchrodingersGat Playing around with the demo site I'm getting uncertain it this is because the application has changed or if I have change work process how to create new revisions...

If you duplicate the latest revision of a part, delete the old BoM and assign a new revision then the latest serial number also get duplicated
But if you create a new part with the same name and IPN the serial number starts over from 1 also if it's marked as "revision of" the old vertsion.

I think I mostly have created new parts when adding revisions also in the past but now I'm not sure...

What is the intended behavior?

[SchrodingersGat]

@gunstr can you provide some screenshots of the issue?

[gunstr]

@SchrodingersGat I'm not sure exactly what you need but I reproduced the issue on the Demo site and took a few screenshots... Let me know if you need more.

1. Create a new trackable part with name = Trackable part, revision = RevA, Assembly = True
2. Add someting to the BoM
3. Create a BO for 10pcs, issue the BO and allocate the part in the BoM
4. Add build output, the next suggested serial number is 1. Enter 1+

5. Finalize the BO
6. Create a new BO for 10 more pcs
7. Add build output, now the next suggested serial number is 11. Enter 11+

8. Finalize the BO

So far so good

9. Create a new trackable part with name = Trackable part, revision = RevB, Revision of Trackable part | RevA, Assembly = True. Add someting to the BoM.
10. Create a BO for 10pcs of RevB, issue the BO and allocate the part in the BoM
11. Add build output, now the next suggested serial number starts over from 1

This is where I think that the next serial for RevB would have been 21 in earlier releases. As I mentioned it might be so that I have created new revisions in the past by duplicating and edit the old revision. However, that method would obvioulsy fail if both revisions are manufactured in parallel why it would really be preferred that the system can create unique serials for a part across revisions.

[SchrodingersGat]

Ah ok that was helpful.

So the way that the serial number validation works can be explained by this code:

        if get_global_setting('SERIAL_NUMBER_GLOBALLY_UNIQUE', False):
            # Serial number must be unique across *all* parts
            parts = Part.objects.all()
        else:
            # Serial number must only be unique across this part "tree"
            parts = Part.objects.filter(tree_id=self.tree_id)

        stock = StockItem.objects.filter(part__in=parts, serial=serial)

        if stock_item:
            # Exclude existing StockItem from query
            stock = stock.exclude(pk=stock_item.pk)

So the parts used to validate a "unique" serial number are only the ones in the same "variant tree" - https://docs.inventree.org/en/stable/part/template

This means that you will need to mark the part as a "variant of" a template for the serial number validation to work across multiple revisions in this way.

Documentation

• Revisions
• Templates and Variants

[gunstr]

Make sense as what I understand each revision has been handled as completely separate parts in the database.

The reson why I "thought" this was working in the past is probably that I have in most cases created a new revision by duplicating the previous revision. I have verified on the Demo site that the "next serial" is then also copied. But because of the import restrictions discussed in #9248 I have changed the work process a bit and do more of the BoM creation outside Inventree and then also creates new revisions from scratch rather then duplicating the old.

As there is a connection between parts with the new "revision of" setting I assume it would be theoretically possible the calculate the next serial number across revisions of a product? If so, do you think that could be done as a plugin?

Anyway, this is not a major issue as the only implication is to manually lookup the next sertial number when creating the first BO output for a new revision. The major benifit to automate this would come in cases where multiple revisions are manufactured in parallell as I mentioned above, but although it happens it is less common (at least for us).