Forum — Recorder General Chat

Moving Recorder 6 into a cloud

null@example.com (danak) — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:41:01 +0000

Hello,

Our current server is quite old and there is a push to move it into a cloud version called Azure. I seem to be the main user, but I don’t think I know enough about it to consider all possible drawbacks. Just wondered if anyone have an experience of moving Recorder 6 into a cloud and could advise (things to do/not do), please? I should mention that it was last updated in March 2022.

Thank you

Recommended Taxon Key

null@example.com (BDeed) — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:34:49 +0000

Quick question, the 'Recommended Taxon Key' in the Taxon hierarchy of the export wizard. Is this the recommended List Item Key (presumably from the master list) or the Taxon Version Key?

Website SSL Expired

null@example.com (BDeed) — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:04:53 +0000

Not sure if this is a managed shutdown but i haven't seen an announcement?

Seems like the SSL certificate has expired on the recorder6 website (https://www.recorder6.info/)

"The certificate verification failed in rule 'Block Expired Server (7 Day Tolerance) and Expired CA Certificates'."

Current Recorder6 data model

null@example.com (Wolfgang) — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:23:08 +0000

Hi,
does anybody have the data model of the current version of Recorder6? That means the definitions of all fields in all tables in Recorder6? I have a documentation by Charles Copp from June 2004. Has the model changed since?
I'm asking because our IT has suggested to move those of my Access databases which link to Recorder to Azure. As far as I understand Azure can't just link to SQL Server as Access can. So the tables have to be set up in Azure again and then filled with the data from SQL Server. For that reason I would need the definition of tables and fields in Recorder6.
Has anybody done something similar and knows more?

Thanks,
Wolfgang
Hampshire Biodiversity Information Centre

Test Data

null@example.com (MikeWeideli) — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:26:32 +0000

Please, has anyone a large 5000 plus import file in Excel I can use for Test data. The dat will not end up in any live sytem and will be deleted from the test system as soon as the test is complete.

Newbie Issues

null@example.com (nevilhutchinson) — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 19:39:09 +0000

Just thought I'd flag up a couple of issues that cropped up when I set up R6 for the first time as a new user.

First - when I downloaded the SQL software I thought that somehow I needed to 'activate' it so that R6 would find it when I downloaded that. I found an 'install' exe file and ran it, but it seemed to be a vestigial file unrelated to the version I'd downloaded. I kept being asked to point it at an older version of SQL which didn't make sense. Anyway, the long and short of it is that you don't need to do anything other than download the version you want/is recommended in the R6 guide.

Second - when I came to update the dictionaries I kept thinking the program had crashed. That's because the first update is huge and can take up to an hour. But you keep getting a 'Not Responding' message from the R6 screen, which suggests something's not quite right. So I kept quitting before it had completed the task. I thought that 20 mins should have been quite long enough, and the progress bar hadn't budged.

The first problem is probably unlikely to occur again - just me being stupid. But I wonder if you might add something about the likely length of time the big updates take in the Dictionary Update page?

Cheers
Nevil

Building a large rucksack

null@example.com (BDeed) — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 10:36:50 +0000

Does anyone have alternate ways of generating a large (about 1800 species) rucksack from a list of (good) species names other than by using the Rucksack Generator?

Remote working

null@example.com (ALERC_NC) — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 15:45:06 +0000

Hi Everyone,

Having had a conversation about this today and considering that home and remote working might be something that is with us for good now, it would be interesting to know who has Recorder set up on a server and is accessing it over a VPN etc. from home. There may be people out there who want to do this but at the moment only have Recorder on a single standalone machine and require a bit of help and support.

Thanks,

Tom

Thank you

null@example.com (FNRCinfoassist) — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 17:58:24 +0000

I would like to thank those responsible for changing the import wizard so that you can now filter on any errors. This is a brilliant change for me, instead of scrolling for ages trying to find the 3 errors in a 7k20k+ import, tick the wee box and there they are. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Mhairi

Security protocol issues

null@example.com (paul.stevens) — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 08:32:18 +0000

Hi,
We've recently had some issues with our host organisation in allowing us to remotely access Recorder. This hasn't worked due to, according to out IT team, some out-dated security protocols that are not available on the remote access servers. More worryingly, there is currently an ongoing project to disable the use of this protocol across all of the server estate as it is deemed to be a security risk.
The protocol looks like it requires TLS 1.0 to connect to the database. When this protocol was disabled by a the team one of the original servers the software stopped working.
Please excuse the fact I'm paraphrasing words from our IT team, so I'm not sure this will fully make sense. Ultimately I'm looking to see if there is a fix/alternative way of doing this.

Many thanks,
Paul.

Irish Grid / Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM)

null@example.com (JoRoller) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 14:18:52 +0000

Hi,
as Irish Grid has now been largely replaced as a coordinate system by Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM), I was wondering if there are any plans to integrate ITM into Recorder, e.g. allowing for upload of records in ITM.

------------------
Jochen Roller | National Parks & Wildlife Service | Dublin

Using Recorder 6 outside the UK

null@example.com (Darwyn Sumner) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 07:46:03 +0000

How much interest is there in this?
Mike Weideli tells me that there are some, I used it for work which finished up as a brief presentation at the NFBR conference "Think globally, record locally effective biological recording at the scale needed" and of course there's the German version of R6.

Issues relating to R6 usage outside the UK were not covered by the recent survey so if you do use it in this way please reply to this thread.

Here's a handful of notes and observations:
1. There's been an increasing trend towards providing georeferenced locations to species occurrences in papers published by European authors in recent years.
2. Recorder 6 handles the location hierarchy well, just flip from OSGR to Lat/Long and perhaps augment with Google Earth searches.
3. Simply output a report with lat/long columns to a csv and you've got your European distribution in QGIS
4. Non-UK species dictionaries are slightly problematic but feasible
5. No basic outline map for Europe in R6

If the Recorder 6 consortium are to develop it in the future then it would be handy to know if it's not just me. One or two small tweaks and it could be sold abroad.

Recorder 6 and SharePoint

null@example.com (Lindsay_FifeNature) — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:41:41 +0000

The LERC I work for is part of a Council who are currently in the process of migrating to SharePoint. The eventual removal of network drives will result. Recorder 6 is on a virtual server, but information the software uses (e.g. Addins, Base Maps, xml, wzd, Rucksacks, etc. etc.) appears as a network drive and we would also currently import from and export to locations on network drives. I was wondering if anyone who uses Recorder 6 is already working in a SharePoint environment and has any experiences they could share?

Thanks,
Linds

Allocating VCs to records

null@example.com (DGERC) — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 12:27:45 +0000

Just wondering how others allocate records to VCs in R6.

I have a moth record which has a 1km grid square attached. The grid square is 90% in one VC (74) and 10% in another (73). I have preferred to derive VCs from grid refs - I usually just use the largest area of overlap as the record VC, or for six-figure refs or less allocate the VC based on the centroid.

Except this record causes me a problem in that it is from a published source that states it was in the 10% VC - a new VC record and to date the only VC record for that species. This is where the derived approach falls down, as the species is excluded from the VC74 list as this record would be allocated to the VC73 with largest overlap. Hmm...

I'm left with the alternative approach of storing the VC for the record in R6, either by linking to an administrative area directly for each sample or by assigning a VC via location.However I don't use the location hierarchy for every record (preferring to use just location name for many, particularly those imported from external sources such as national schemes, iRecord etc.) so allocating locations for every record would require a major change of approach.

So just wondering how others approach this? I'm expecting that many use the location hierarchy so I'm probably not going to like what I hear...

Red List categories in R6

null@example.com (DGERC) — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 09:10:11 +0000

Was having a look at Red List designations in R6 for plants. It seems that species which are categorised in England on the 'Vascular Plant Red List for England' are given the status of Red List Great Britain (RLGBXXX in the status abbreviation when exported). None of the fields thath are exportable allow any way of filtering out any statuses that don't apply here in Scotland. As an example, Heather Calluna vulgaris has the England Red List status of near threatened (NT), but I believe the GB Red List status when last published was Least Concern (LC). In Scotland only one of these is relevant to me. I apparently have no way of knowing which one I'm getting out when I extract the data.

Clear as mud to me... perhaps someone else can enlighten me!

MARK