Stocks with multiple organisms (v1.4)

[spficklin]

This issue imported from the Chado v1.4 requested changes google doc:

Lacey Sanderson and Ethy Cannon need to represent germplasm (stock) with more than one contributed organism (e.g. interspecific crosses). Suggestion is to add a stock_organism table but organism_id in stock table is not null, implying a primary contributor.

This is also a problem for feature maps where the landmark feature (e.g. linkage group) is from a single feature that has a single species.

Bob MacCullum says (3/10/2015): I (Bob) thought stock.organism_id was already allowed null - we certainly use it that way (organism_id is always null) and we have no documented SQL changes. However, I think that's a problem with our documentation!! Here's something I emailed to the list, but reading it again I see an unfinished sentence… I think it was supposed to end with "expect undefined behaviour when doing find_or_create on tables with multiple keys including fields with null values".

Stephen says (3/10/2015): Yes, you’re right Bob, the table does allow NULL for an organism_id, perhaps this will resolve the issue, Lacey & Ethy, and allow you to use a stock_organism table?

Sook says (3/18/2015): What about adding a type_id to the stock_organism to specify the relationship between the stock record and the organisms (e.g. derives_from).