Deep merge

[ferrisoxide]

Describe the task

The current merge feature doesn't try to merge the histories of initiatives with the same name. It creates "duplicates" of initiatives instead, suffixing each with a unique number (e.g. "Food Security, Food Security (1), Food Security (2)", etc).

This appears to be counter to expectations, as some users have expressed a desire to have a single, consolidated history for initiatives. This will require creating a synthetic history that takes into account all the status changes occurring in separate initiatives with the same names.

To preser

Success Criteria

• MUST merge the complete comment and state history for each initiative, when deep merge mode is used
• MUST allow deep merge features to be accessible via rake tasks
• MUST preserve the existing "shallow merge" mechanism that duplicates initiatives

Related Issues

#982

[ferrisoxide]

NOTES TO QA

@SishaMish This is on production and ready for QA.

The new feature is available via the Impact Card grid:

The thing to check for here is mostly how well the deep merge maintains state and comment for initiatives with the same name (aka "clashing initiatives").

Checklist items, statuses and comments

For any checklist items found in clashing initiatives, the final state should be the most recently updated checklist item and comment. Any previous comments / statuses should be available when running the Comments Report against the merged card.

Organisations and Subsystem Tags

Any organisations or subsystem tags should be combined, such that the merged initiative will contain the complete set of either from the original initiatives.

E.g. If there are two initiatives in different cards, both called "Foo". If the "Foo" in card 1 has the organisation "Org 1" and "Org 2" and the "Foo" in card 2 has the organisations "Org 1" and "Org 3", when they are merge the final "Foo" initiative will have Org 1, Org 2 and Org 3. The same applies to Subsystem Tags.

Contact details

When two initiatives are merged the contact details will persist no matter which initiative was updated last. If both initiatives had contact details we will use the most recent, but if the last updated initiative does not have any contact details we will defer to whatever was in the first initiative.