I am not entirely sure whether it is possible to add your own list however what might work better is adding your own designation. This could be your local BAP designation with species associated using a rucksack. There is a technical tutorial which guides a user through the process of adding your own designation.This tutorial is not quite ready to disseminate right now but hopefully will be available very soon from the new website. I will post a message in the announcements section when the new website is up and running.

Lynn

There's no need to create a dictionary in order to store local status; it's actually very easy to create and add a custom status to taxa within Recorder. I've done a quick screencast to demonstrate:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/256478/screencasts/Recorder_Designations_Setup.swf

You can create a rucksack of species and bulk assign them with the new designation using a batch update (Tools > Run Batch Updates > Designations > Des2). If you don't like working with Rucksacks, then you can maintain a list of TAXON_LIST_ITEM_KEYS in a CSV and use that with a batch update (Des3).

If you want to report on your new custom designation within Recorder, you need to add it to your own Designation Set. This is also easy to do:

1. Select Reports > Run > System reports > Information > SY05
2. Export the resulting list to Excel
3. Open it in Excel and remove any items you DON'T want in your Designation Set
4. Save as a CSV
5. In Recorder, select Tools > Run Batch Updates > Designations > Des1

The Des1 report will walk you through the rest.

Let me know if you have any questions at all about any of these processes. In 6.14, designations reporting finally became practical and useful and I'd hate to see anyone become snagged up and frustrated when in actual fact, we've got something really good here now. So yes, give me a shout if you need any further assistance.

Charles

Hi Tony,

That one's easy. The table INDEX_TAXON_NAME is compiled when you update the taxon name index from the tools menu. As far as I can tell this cuts through all the crap and contains fields like ACTUAL NAME, PREFERRED NAME, TAXON LIST ITEM KEY and even RECOMMENDED TAXON LIST ITEM KEY.

So just start with your list of names, run a query using this table, copy the resulting list into an empty rucksack file, then follow the instructions, job done.

Cheers mate

As luck would have it, I've just had to create a rucksack based on a list of species someone provided to us in a spreadsheet. Thought it might be helpful if I outlined the steps I took.

1. In the spreadsheet, the list of species is contained in column A, so I write the following formula in column B:

="'"&A2&"',"

This wraps the species name in single quotes and adds a comma onto the end.

2. Copy this formula down the column to cover all species names

3. Copy the result

4. Create an SQL query like this, using the list you just copied (don't forget to remove the last comma from the last species):

select distinct
    itn.recommended_taxon_list_item_key
from
    index_taxon_name itn
where
    itn.actual_name in ('Hepialus hecta',
'Hepialus fusconebulosa',
'Phragmataecia castaneae',
'Cossus cossus',
'Adscita statices',
'Adscita geryon',
'Jordanita globulariae',
'Zygaena trifolii',
'Zygaena trifolii form decreta',
'Zygaena trifolii form palustrella',
'Zygaena filipendulae x lonicerae')

5. With the resulting list of recommended_taxon_list_item_keys, paste them into a rucksack between the <TAXON></TAXON> tags.

You should now have a rucksack populated with your required species. Note, if the name in the species list you're using doesn't match one of those in Recorder, you're not going to get a result back, so you need to check to make sure the number of recommended_taxon_list_item_keys you're getting back matches the number of species you're putting in.

I've uploaded a zip file containing the files I used/generated in this process:

http://forums.nbn.org.uk/uploads.php?file=making_a_rucksack.zip