Recipe versioning and recipe to inventory linking

[RobO]

Recipe Versioning
I'd be great if I had the ability to version my recipes without having to do it manually. For instance, I might want to tweak an existing recipe, maybe more than once, but I don't want to lose the original recipe or path to the current recipe. Additionally, it would reduce the clutter in my recipe folders so I don't have multiple entries of the same tweaked recipe.

Recipe to Inventory Linking
Another feature that I'm always wanting is a recipe to inventory linking capability. Currently, I have to navigate back and forth between my inventory and a recipe that I'm preparing to brew. If there was some indication on the recipe page with the amounts of the ingredients I currently have, that would be awesome!

BTW- I love all the Brewer's Friend tools!

-Rob

 

[JoeSchmoe]

Actually, as far as versioning is concerned, Brewer's Friend is already almost where you want it. There already exists the ability to create a recipe "snapshot", which is essentially branching off a new version of the recipe where you are free to make tweaks to the snapshot without changing the original recipe. Additionally, each snapshot maintains a link to its "parent" recipe, the one it was branched from. This is a handy feature, and I create a snapshot pretty much every time I brew a recipe. This lets me make brew-day changes without messing up the "pristine" version of my recipe.

To get to explicit versioning, a few more things are needed:
* As far as I can see, recipe snapshots can only be created when starting a brew session. You (and myself included) would probably want the ability to explicitly create a new version at any time.
* The recipe view should organize and present recipe versions a little better to make it clear what versions exist and from where they were branched. You might imagine that each recipe is listed once, and recipes which have snapshots can then be "expanded" like a tree to show the snapshots of that recipe and from where those recipes were branched (think of what happens if you create a new snapshot from an existing snapshot).
* Perhaps the ability to give snapshots a version-specific name that sums up what that snapshot tries to do (think "2.0" or "more hops!!")

And if the Brewer's Friend developers want to go for extra credit: provide the ability to see the differences between any two versions of the same recipe