Challenges with more flexible asset tag auto-incrementing

[snipe]

This has come up a few times in various ways (#3286, #3914, #8385, #9013). To summarize, folks would like to be able to dynamically prefix the asset tags for the auto-incrementer. Some folks want to use {category-abbreviation}-TheNextNumber, others want to use {location-abbreviation}-TheNextNumber.

The challenge here is that with tags being dynamic this way, we won't be able to know what that next number should be. Right now, the next auto-increment value is stored on the settings table, since any new asset will increment that number. We have an observer that increments that value when a new asset is created:

snipe-it/app/Observers/AssetObserver.php

Lines 71 to 116 in 7f38ca2

	/**
	* Listen to the Asset created event, and increment
	* the next_auto_tag_base value in the settings table when i
	* a new asset is created.
	*
	* @param Asset $asset
	* @return void
	*/
	public function created(Asset $asset)
	{
	if ($settings = Setting::getSettings()) {
	$tag = $asset->asset_tag;
	$prefix = $settings->auto_increment_prefix;
	$number = substr($tag, strlen($prefix));
	// IF - auto_increment_assets is on, AND (there is no prefix OR the prefix matches the start of the tag)
	// AND the rest of the string after the prefix is all digits, THEN...
	if ($settings->auto_increment_assets && ($prefix=='' || strpos($tag, $prefix) === 0) && preg_match('/\d+/',$number) === 1) {
	// new way of auto-trueing-up auto_increment ID's
	$next_asset_tag = intval($number, 10) + 1;
	// we had to use 'intval' because the $number could be '01234' and
	// might get interpreted in Octal instead of decimal
	// only modify the 'next' one if it's *bigger* than the stored base
	//
	if($next_asset_tag > $settings->next_auto_tag_base) {
	$settings->next_auto_tag_base = $next_asset_tag;
	$settings->save();
	}
	} else {
	// legacy method
	$settings->increment('next_auto_tag_base');
	$settings->save();
	}
	}
	$logAction = new Actionlog();
	$logAction->item_type = Asset::class; // can we instead say $logAction->item = $asset ?
	$logAction->item_id = $asset->id;
	$logAction->created_at = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
	$logAction->user_id = Auth::id();
	if($asset->imported) {
	$logAction->setActionSource('importer');
	}
	$logAction->logaction('create');
	}

While I very much like the idea of setting patterns for labels and auto-incrementing, I don't know how we'd do that exactly, since a dynamic prefix means we need to store different increments for each type of prefix. Adding a prefix (and corresponding counter)for every imaginable combination of location/category/model/etc isn't realistic, and if the admin decides to change that asset tag scheme, knowing how to rectify that without screwing up their asset tags seems kind of impossible.

Additionally, some folks may want certain types of assets to skip auto-incrementing, which makes this even hairier.

This also relates to [SC-23994], [SC-18809] and [SC-15054] internally.