We have a few fields in the database that are absolute values but really should be ranges. Plant Height and Plant Spread are the two main ones. Right now these are simply fields you type a number in. It's very useful information when you're looking at a plant, but completely useless for searching. Plus it has been a headache keeping those fields consistent, since anyone can type whatever they want into them.
What if we came up with a list of possible "Maximum Heights" and "Maximum Spread" options, and migrate the data into that? Then what I can do is update the search page to let you specify a range that will match anything inside that range? It seems like that would be the right solution for this problem. The only downside is that we'd lose a little bit of the freedom that a text box brings. You'd have to select the closest maximum height. We may also need a minimum height since plants can be anywhere inside of a range, and we'd need to specify the lower and upper range on a plant by plant basis.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
