1 Reply by DaveSlade

  • DaveSlade
  • Veteran
  • Offline
  • Registered: 15-05-2006
  • Posts: 332

Re: Solving the Recording Card problem

If you use the 'add species' feature to build a recording card and are not meticulously careful in selecting the prefered name from a prefered list then you run the risk of that card crashing R2002. This is a problem that has caused me to waste a great deal of tidying up corrupted cards, and I was disappointed to hear from Sally Rankin that this problem persists in R6.

Although the problem does not cause the exceptions in R6 as it did in R2002, if a Recording Card is built in this way and Common Names or non-prefered names are used, and this card was given to a volunteer running R2002 (because their computer is not powerful enoguh to run R6) then it would cause the system to crash. I appreciate that there is no chance of this problem being fixed in R2002, but I do feel that it should be addressed in R6.

So my suggestion would be that when a species is selected using either a common name, or a synonym the key that is added to the Recording Card (and indeed to the taxon occurence) should be the key for the prefered name - which sounds so rediculously simple it'll probably cost a fortune to implement.

Dave Slade
Senior IT & Records Officer,
15 Talbot Road, Talbot Green, Pontyclun, CF72 8AD
www.sewbrec.org.uk, www.sewbrecord.org.uk

2 Reply by johnvanbreda

  • johnvanbreda
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • From: UK
  • Registered: 27-04-2006
  • Posts: 1,237

Re: Solving the Recording Card problem

Hi Dave,

The coding for this would be very simple indeed, though testing would take a little longer since it would require testing the card against Recorder 6 and 2002.

However, I have one question about this.  Should it be possible to specify a record card that uses the synonyms for display of the name and recording rather than the preferred name?  It may be important to know that the observation was made using the synonym rather than the preferred name and if we make this change then this possibility will be lost.

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

johnvanbreda's Website

3 Reply by DaveSlade

  • DaveSlade
  • Veteran
  • Offline
  • Registered: 15-05-2006
  • Posts: 332

Re: Solving the Recording Card problem

Should it be possible to specify a record card that uses the synonyms for display of the name and recording rather than the preferred name?  It may be important to know that the observation was made using the synonym rather than the preferred name and if we make this change then this possibility will be lost.

It is certainly the case that this information may be needed at some point... the problem being that once a recording card contains a TAXON_LIST_ITEM_KEY that is not a prefered name, it will no longer run properly in R2002. Perhaps a simpler solution would be that if a user chooses to save the added taxa to the recording card Recorder could reject any of these non-prefered terms (perferably with a message saying that these non-prefered items will not be saved)?

Dave Slade
Senior IT & Records Officer,
15 Talbot Road, Talbot Green, Pontyclun, CF72 8AD
www.sewbrec.org.uk, www.sewbrecord.org.uk