references

references is the controlled vocabulary every form and grid reads: statuses, types, currencies, countries, industries, job titles, and every other closed set a row classifies itself by.

Owns

An enumeration is a table, never a check constraint. A reference column names its own type beside the code, so the foreign key discriminates: a value from another set cannot land in it. Every type seeds a not_specified entry, which is what an optional classification defaults to.

A type is closed or open. A closed type is one the code branches on: the platform owns its membership, no tenant role may write it, and its labels come from the references message namespace, which a tenant renames at /text. An open type is the tenant's own vocabulary — brands, categories, job titles — and its rows carry their own name. is_open on the type is the flag; adding a value to an open type is an insert, not a migration.

Collections and product options are not lookups: they are tenant-authored data with their own tables and cache tags.

Routes

The grids are generated per type, so their settings keys cannot be enumerated ahead of time and fall back to the tenant's defaults.

Settings scope

references.

Permissions

references.read gates the admin screens; references.manage the writes. Reads are protected-tier and cached per tenant under their own tag, and the storefront reads an allowlisted subset anonymously.

Switched off

Never. Every project links it at provisioning.