CutList/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-31-remove-vendor-data-design.md

Remove vendor/supplier data from CutList

Background

CutList's stated purpose is a 1D bin-packing optimizer: given a parts list and available stock, compute an efficient cutting plan. Supplier/vendor management (contacts, part numbers, pricing, purchase orders) was built alongside it but never touched by the packing engine itself (AdvancedFitEngine, MultiBinEngine, CutListPackingService never reference Supplier). It only entered through inventory-management pages.

This surfaced concretely in the Alro Steel catalog scraper: every scraped stock item was wrapped in a supplierOfferings array with empty partNumber/supplierDescription placeholders (Alro's SmartGrid never exposes part numbers), making it needlessly verbose to add or change a stock length. Investigating further surfaced the actual reported bug — a user (Carrol) couldn't figure out how to change an existing stock item's length, because Stock/Edit.razor hard-locks the Length field to readonly outside of creation.

Decision: fix the length-editing bug, and separately, pull vendor/purchasing concepts out of CutList entirely. Procurement (who to buy from, at what price, PO status) is a different domain than nesting optimization. If a "what should we order" feature is needed later, it can live in a layer above CutList that queries the existing Materials/StockItems REST API (MaterialsController, StockItemsController) to compare JobStock requirements against StockItem.QuantityOnHand — nothing in this change forecloses that.

Scope

Kept in CutList (nesting/inventory-relevant)

• StockItem.QuantityOnHand — becomes directly editable via a stripped-down StockTransaction log:
  • Keeps: Quantity, Type (Received/Used/Adjustment/Scrapped; Returned is dead code today — never constructed anywhere, only referenced in a UI badge-color switch — and stays dead, out of scope to touch), JobId, Notes, CreatedAt.
  • Drops: SupplierId, UnitPrice, and the Supplier navigation.
  • StockItemService keeps AddStockAsync/UseStockAsync/AdjustStockAsync/ScrapStockAsync/GetTransactionHistoryAsync/RecalculateQuantityAsync, with supplierId/unitPrice parameters removed from AddStockAsync.
  • Drops GetAverageCostAsync/GetLastPurchasePriceAsync and StockPricingDto entirely — there's no non-vendor version of "cost."
• Job.LockedAt/IsLocked — kept. Becomes a direct manual Lock/Unlock action instead of a side effect of "Add to Order List." Still production-relevant: don't let someone edit a parts list after material's been committed/cut against it.
• Bug fix: Stock/Edit.razor's Length field becomes editable in both create and edit modes. The backend already supports this — StockItemService.ExistsAsync already excludes the current row's ID for the edit case in its (MaterialId, LengthInches) uniqueness check — so this is a front-end-only fix.

Removed entirely (procurement layer, not CutList's job)

• Entities: Supplier, SupplierOffering, PurchaseItem.
• Services/Controllers/DTOs: SupplierService, PurchaseItemService, SuppliersController, SupplierDtos.cs. StockItemsController drops its /offerings and /pricing endpoints.
• Pages: Suppliers/Index.razor, Suppliers/Edit.razor, Orders/Index.razor, Orders/Add.razor. NavMenu.razor loses the Suppliers and Orders links. Home.razor loses the Suppliers dashboard card and supplier/order mentions in the getting-started copy.
• Jobs/Edit.razor: "Add to Order List" button (which created PurchaseItems and locked the job) is replaced with a plain "Lock Job" button that calls JobService.LockAsync directly. Drops the PurchaseItemService dependency and bulk-create logic.
• Catalog import/export: CatalogDtos.cs drops CatalogSupplierDto, CatalogSupplierOfferingDto, CatalogData.Suppliers, and CatalogStockItemDto.SupplierOfferings. CatalogService drops ImportSuppliersAsync and all offering-import logic. Stock items in the catalog format become { lengthInches, quantityOnHand }.
• Seed data: alro-catalog.json already regenerated without vendor wrappers. oneals-catalog.json gets the same treatment via a one-off transform script (not checked in as a permanent tool) — it currently has real O'Neal part numbers/prices, which will be discarded along with the empty Alro placeholders, for consistency.
• CutList.Mcp: removes list_suppliers, add_supplier, list_supplier_offerings, add_supplier_offering, add_stock_with_offering (tools, DTOs, and the corresponding ApiClient methods). Adds a plain add_stock tool: find-or-create material → find-or-create stock item → set quantity — same convenience flow as add_stock_with_offering minus the offering step. Republished to ~/.claude/mcp/CutList.Mcp/ per the standard MCP publishing workflow.

Migration

One new EF Core migration:

• Drops Suppliers, SupplierOfferings, PurchaseItems tables.
• Drops SupplierId/UnitPrice columns and the associated FK from StockTransactions.

This is destructive to whatever currently lives in those tables (e.g., any real Supplier/Offering/PurchaseItem rows in the dev DB). Applied immediately after creation per the usual EF workflow, no separate confirmation gate beyond this design doc.

Out of scope

• Building the "layer above" that would query stock levels for purchasing decisions — not needed now, and the existing Materials/StockItems REST API already exposes what such a layer would need later.
• Any change to the packing algorithm itself (CutList.Core) — untouched by this work, confirming it never depended on vendor data in the first place.
• Removing the dead StockTransactionType.Returned enum value — unused, harmless, unrelated to vendor data.