Creating a recipe menu that cross data with a pantry inventory

[JoseNunez]

Hello everybody, hope you are doing well; I need help with an idea I had been laying around

I already created an App (of personal use) to follow my pantry products in a Inventory kind of way

I already created 3 lists:

1) "Category" (of the products: dairy, meats, etc)

2) "Items table" (all the items in raw in a table list disposition)

3) "Shopping cart" (A list that is feed according to a "Buy" button in each item in the "Items table", if the button is not pressed for every item, then is not added.)

What I want to do now is to create a 4th list for "Recipes": what I intend to do here is to manually import recipes (that I know how to cook) with the Ingredients needed (I don't care to add the preparation, just the items and quantity needed) and then, according to this input, the app should cross verify with the "Items table" and quantity and give a "Available" or "Not available" answer to every recipe imported so I can easily know which recipes I can do or not.

Here some pictures of the ongoing app (is in Spanish as is my main language)

 

Categoría = Category

Productos = product/item

Carrito de compra = shopping cart

Formato = Unit

Comprar? = Buy?

Thank you in advance to all! Have a nice weekend

[Steve]

What are you looking for from us?

[JoseNunez]

Basically, how'd you do it? It is feasible in terms of doing it; it is possible with the free version?

Im not very much of an expert and most I "have achieved" has been with a mix of trial and error but I think this got over me

[alphacp]

As I said, yes I have done something like this but it took a bit of thinking about and a lot of compromise. The simple idea of have a list of recipes linked to a menu, from which you can create a shopping list is really just a grandparent-parent-child database. The shopping list is the complicated bit as it is an enumeration of all the shared ingredients then a calculation of how much you need. With one menu, you can have virtual fields in the ingredients table but if you want to have multiple menus then you need to do things slightly different. A simple way is to have an "active" menu and calculate the required ingredients that way.

The larder is the interesting part. In effect it is a real-time override to the shopping list. As such you need to separately adjust the larder as you use or replenish it. You could do that with a routine that says "adjust based on this shopping list".

[alphacp]

Probably a better way would be to add you menu, then add recipes to it and when you add a recipe, you automate coping the required ingredients and quantities in to a child table. That way you get around the problem above if you have multiple menus. Your shopping list is then based upon this new child table filtered by menu. You just have to manage CRUD between the menu and the new ingredients list. For example, if I decide to change the dessert, I need to delete all the rows for the dessert that was originally there then add the new dessert. 

[alphacp]

As Steve says, what do you need? I have created such an app previously but soon realised that I missed a table to start with. You need an event or menu or date type parent to hang all this off from. And then you need to remember that the larder is only valid on the day that you enter data and not then after. It all got very complicated in the end.