Not sure if we already covered this idea or not, maybe you touched on it at the end of this comment, but it just either came flooding back to me or crystallised in a magical new way my head: if we have inventories (ie. lists of variant overrides at the moment), that record the price, and stock levels for each variant available for sale by a hub (or set of hubs if we can share the lists), why don’t we just use this interface to control the actual availability of variants in the relevant shop(s)? If we can use the inventory interface to set the stock levels and show/hide variants for a given list, we shouldn’t need to double handle that information by turning variants on and off in the order cycle interface, one should just be able to select an inventory to pull from for each outgoing hub, and then any changes made in the inventory interface (our current variant overrides page) will just flow through to the shop.
Is that awesome or is my brain still in holiday mode?
If we want to be able to alter inventory or turn things on and off from the order cycles page we can just pull up the inventory interface in a modal and edit it there (when my new foundation interface comes across). Seems much cleaner than the current setup.
In terms of order cycle coordinator control over the products that are sold through the order cycle, we can retain this functionality through incoming exchanges which will continue to do what they do now: act as a whitelist filter for the variants that are saleable through a given order cycle. I guess that means that our “friends of friends” order cycle is just one where the whitelist is switched off, and anyone can sell whatever they want.
I seriously can’t tell if this is just sounding better because I have forgotten about all of the use cases and constraints or if I have had a good idea. Anyway, we can talk next week.