Cartons vs Shipments admin UI

[cedum]

The admin order->shipments UI shows "Shipped package ..." for both Cartons and Shippings. While in reality, the "real" shipped packages are represented only by Cartons (afaik).

Solidus Version: I think it's present in all maintained versions.

To Reproduce

• create an order with at least 2 products
• cancel one product and ship the other one (having a canceled item highlights better this issue)
• it now shows two shipped packages (first is the shipped Carton, the second one is the Shipment)

Screenshots

[tvdeyen]

I have a nearly done PR laying around somewhere. Made this for a customer once and we are happy to share this with the community

[seandawes]

@cedum Do not believe this should change as this relies on the data found in spree_shipments table and more so specifically spree_shipments.state ? As spree_shipments.tracking contains the shipment containers tracking number if available and can be mapped to your product catalog via spree_shipments.order_id where as spree_cartons does not contain anything to connect the tables?

First thing I thought of and maybe Im wrong here.

[jarednorman]

Cartons should also have tracking and can be mapped back to the order through the inventory units.

[tvdeyen]

I finally made a draft PR that simplifies a lot (but also makes a lot of assumptions) https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/pull/4319

[tvdeyen]

I think the most confusing thing about cartons is that they can hold multiple orders. This is not what most of our users do and we should think about moving that feature into an extension instead. In that extension Cartons should then probably be its own Admin Tab, because they do not belong to an individual order any more.

For the current backend I think we should remove that feature and nest all cartons under each shipment and remove most of the duplication. That's what I did in the draft PR.