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[Reelya]

If that's the case, why not just tweak the stockpile settings? You can still allow the limited number of types of domestic animal eggs to be collected, but turn off collection for wild animals. You only need to collect eggs if you actually want your dwarves to cook/eat eggs of that particular species.

A lot of the issue comes from just plonking down default stockpiles and not setting specific ones for different foods. Personally, I don't use default food stockpiles whatsoever after the initial temporary embark phase.

[Eldin00]

If that's the case, why not just tweak the stockpile settings? You can still allow the limited number of types of domestic animal eggs to be collected, but turn off collection for wild animals. You only need to collect eggs if you actually want your dwarves to cook/eat eggs of that particular species.

Just tweaking the stockpiles isn't enough. You also have to turn off cooking of that specific type of egg.  Otherwise, a cook might decide to grab the eggs from the nestbox even though no stockpile accepts them. And to disable cooking, you have to have eggs available which could be cooked, so there's still the need to notice that the eggs have been laid and take action to protect them before your dwarves notice the eggs and decide to grab them for themselves.

The only sure way to protect eggs for breeding without having to watch your nest boxes for eggs to be laid is to put the nest boxes and breeding animals into a locked room.

[Deboche]

What would be ideal, is to actually implement advanced animal population control that works like the kitchen screen. Say you can set a "target" number of turkeys in the fortress, e.g. 20 turkeys. Then, if you have 17 turkeys, 3 hatchable eggs will be automatically forbidden. The only issue should be what to do if those egg's mother is killed or something.

This is similar to the collect clay/sand automatically when it reaches a certain number and cook a certain plant automatically only if you have a decent number of seeds available suggestions.

You could also make a setting where you'll set the number of turkeys + eggs to 30 but set the slaughtering threshold to 20 so that if you had more than 20 turkeys, those extra would be slaughtered for meat but there would always be eggs to make the population 30.

[Bigheaded]

I usually just make sure my cook doesn't cook them and they're not allowed in a stockpile.

I'm usually rather picky about my food stockpiles. which helps, seeing eggs are usually fully disabled anyway. Or fully enabled. must admit it's a bit annoying trying to locate one type of egg in an egg stockpile to prevent that one particular egg from being moved.

As i mentioned there are cases where a locked door is not a solution.

[LordBaal]

For this and many many more things there's an increasingly need for us that Toady tackles the manager and made it more "DFHacky", in that it allow you to give more specific orders like gather eggs of x species but leave x amount.

[Reelya]

If that's the case, why not just tweak the stockpile settings? You can still allow the limited number of types of domestic animal eggs to be collected, but turn off collection for wild animals. You only need to collect eggs if you actually want your dwarves to cook/eat eggs of that particular species.

Just tweaking the stockpiles isn't enough. You also have to turn off cooking of that specific type of egg.  Otherwise, a cook might decide to grab the eggs from the nestbox even though no stockpile accepts them. And to disable cooking, you have to have eggs available which could be cooked, so there's still the need to notice that the eggs have been laid and take action to protect them before your dwarves notice the eggs and decide to grab them for themselves.

The only sure way to protect eggs for breeding without having to watch your nest boxes for eggs to be laid is to put the nest boxes and breeding animals into a locked room.

Yeah sorry I forgot about that because I link up my kitchens by default so I can fine-tune the ingredients used.

[Tristan Alkai]

I just stick a door on the nesting area and lock it whenever I want the animal population to increase.

But an (O)rder whether or not to harvest eggs could be nice, too. Or maybe a setting on a box by box basis, but that could be complicated...

With the recent closing of "breeding by spores" (v0.40.19), the locked door solution has become a lot trickier to pull off. 

There is also the edge case of elk birds: they are grazers, so it generally makes sense to pasture them with the other grazers.  However, the other grazers can mostly be milked or sheared, so dwarves need access to the area.  How do you let the elk birds graze while keeping the eggs safe? 

I specifically want the "don't collect eggs from this box" setting to allow controlling population growth without completely eliminating it.  For example:
1. Turkeys are great for egg production.  I embark with three hens and a gobbler. 
2. Turkeys are also large, and produce plenty of meat and tallow.  I want to divert some eggs for hatching so I can butcher the chicks once they grow up. 
3. Ideally, I want to collect eggs from two of the three nest boxes, and hatch chicks in the third. 
4. Stockpile and cooking settings don't permit this sort of detail.  You end up either collecting from all three (which means no extra turkeys to butcher later) or none of the three (which means a birdsplosion).

The "setting on a box by box basis" is the feature requested in the OP.  If hives already have a similar setting (I haven't played enough with beekeeping to know) then "automatically forbid eggs laid in this box" shouldn't be that hard. 

[LordBaal]

It would be a simple solution by code, but still demands great micromanagement. I insist, an "collect all eggs until the amount if X" order by the manager or kitchen menu would be far better. You could then keep as many eggs you want and collect any spare egg.

[Deboche]

The "setting on a box by box basis" is the feature requested in the OP.  If hives already have a similar setting (I haven't played enough with beekeeping to know) then "automatically forbid eggs laid in this box" shouldn't be that hard.

They do indeed. You can switch between "gather products" and "do not gather products". It's roughly the same as with coffins.

I'd like the feature of setting each nest box to gather eggs or leave them there but I'd also like the feature of doing it according to population and egg numbers.