I have several types of products (boards, cabinets, doors) that we alternately manufacture or sell. I need to add a discriminator field to product.template to specify what type of product we're dealing with.

There is already a field called type on product.template, which has the possible values of product, consu, and service.

To me this field should probably be renamed to inventory_method as it better represents the available choices and results, but that is another debate.

If I wanted to add some choices, I'd rename "Stockable Product" to "General Stocked Product" and add a few more options, like "Door", "Cabinet", etc.

For all these new types i'd like them to be treated as stockable.

Would you recommend creating a new field for this kind of disambiguation, or overriding the type field? Would that be "safe", in that it would not effect other parts of the inventory system?