Topic: Release of the Recorder 6 v6.18.1 upgrade
As part of our Recorder 6 support and maintenance contract with JNCC, Mike Weideli, John van Breda and I have completed the upgrade to v6.18.1. It is now available for download from http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-4612 . Please note that new installation disks/downloads will not be made available for this release. This upgrade contains a series of bug fixes and several minor changes. Please see the release notes on the download page for more details. The Help will be updated as part of the upgrade and the section headed ‘Significant changes in Recorder 6 version 6.18’ on the Home page lists the changes with appropriate links to sections of the Help that provide more information. I hope this will assist users with taking advantage of the new functionality.
If you ran the candidate release upgrade announced in http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=15674#p15674 please run the latest version of the upgrade from http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-4612 .
The v6.18 upgrade starts the implementation of the extensive taxon dictionary upgrade by the Natural History Museum. The full implementation, planned for v6.19, is designed to alleviate some of the reporting problems in Recorder 6. The v6.18 upgrade adds the Organism table which then needs to be populated with dictionary upgrades 00000015 to 0000001N – see http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-4615 . Please heed the warnings about upgrading to v6.18 first and about 00000015 to 0000001N taking a long time to run. They should take 1 to 2 hours to run but on older/slower machines they may take much longer. Also, don’t forget to rebuild all 4 indexes after the dictionary upgrade. Users who ran 00000015 to 0000001A announced in http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=15674#p15674 should run 0000001B to 0000001N. These timimgs were true for the original 00000015 to 0000001A but when preparing 00000015 to 0000001N Mike Weieli was able to speed up the upgrade considerably.
Please report any problems or issues on the forum http://forums.nbn.org.uk/index.php .
The revised Help can be accessed prior to upgrading your system by unzipping the download then extracting Rec20Hlp.chm from the Help folder in UpgradeFiles.zip. Provided your system allows you to open .chm files you will be able open Rec20Hlp.chm and see the Help as it appears in Recorder 6.
I have reproduced the list of significant changes in this release from the Home page below for those who would like to read more about them before downloading, although the formatting and hyperlinks that take you to the full details in the Help have been lost.
Significant changes in Recorder 6 version 6.18
Recorder 6 version 6.18 will import data from, and export data to, Excel 2007 and 2010 files, i.e. *.xlsx files. The previous versions would only import from and export to Excel 2003 and earlier files, i.e. *.xls files.
The Sources tab, used throughout the system to link items to internal documents and external references, has been enhanced to allow website URLs to be specified as external references, in addition to file paths. When entering external references, a display caption can also be specified which will be shown, instead of the reference itself, on the Sources tab. If a file path is stored in the External File Path, specified on the File Locations tab in Tools - Options, then that part of the file path isn't displayed on the Sources tab.
Two new options have been added for viewing the location hierarchy. If "Include file code in location hierarchy" is ticked on the General tab in Tools - Options, then the file codes will appear alongside the location names in the hierarchy on the left. If "Include spatial reference in location hierarchy" is ticked then the spatial references will appear alongside the location names.
The parent locations in the the location hierarchy can now be sorted by location name, file code or spatial reference.
Changing the location on a survey event or sample or adding a new one, used to, in some circumstances, automatically change the spatial reference of the event or sample. This behaviour has been reviewed and, when changing the location on a survey event or sample now, you will receive a prompt asking "Do you want to update the spatial reference to the centroid of the selected location?" with the option to answer Yes or No.
A completely blank dictionary list called " A List to hold User Added Taxa" has been added to the taxon dictionary. It appears as the first list in the taxon dictionary. It has been provided for users who wish to keep all their user added taxa together in one place rather than to add them to different lists in the dictionary.
When filtering observations in the observation hierarchy, a filter can be set on the Surveyor's Ref.
Conditions can now be set on the following fields for taxon occurrences in the report wizard:
Obs Changed Date - must be input in yyyymmdd format
Obs Entry Date - must be input in yyyymmdd format
Obs Key
Obs Confidential - Yes or No
Obs Verified - 0, 1 or 2
Obs Zero Abundance - Yes or NoVarious attributes have been added to the report wizard:
Event group
Event Top-level Location
Metadata group
Survey Key
Survey Entry Date
Survey Changed Date
Event Key
Event Entry Date
Event Changed Date
Sample Key
Sample Entry Date
Sample Changed DateSample group
Sample Easting SW Corner
Sample Easting Centre
Sample Northing SW Corner
Sample Northing CentreSample group - Grid square group
Sample 100 m Square
Sample 10 m Square
Sample TetradSample group - Location group
Sample Top-level Location
Taxon group
Taxon Kingdom
Taxon Phylum
Taxon Class
Taxon Order
Taxon Family
Recommended Common Name/Taxon Group
Recommended Taxon Name without Sub-genus
Taxon group - Observation Metadata group
Obs Entry Date
Obs Changed DateNote that Obs Key has been moved to the Observation Metadata group within the Taxon group and other attributes in the Observation group have been moved to the Observations group within the Taxon group. More information has been added to the Help about the different options for outputting taxon names.
As well as the changes above, a few things were added after the Help was updated but before release:
The following attributes have also been added:
1. Recommended Taxon Name/Attribute no sub gen. – the recommended scientific name as specified in the taxon dictionary without the sub-genus when applicable, plus the attribute, e.g. sensu lato, when present.
2. Recommended Taxon Name/Attribute – the recommended scientific name as specified in the taxon dictionary, plus the attribute, e.g. sensu lato, when present.
3. Taxon Latin Name/Attribute no sub gen. – the scientific name for the taxon entered without the sub-genus when applicable, plus the attribute when present.
4. Taxon Latin Name/Attribute – the scientific name for the taxon entered, plus the attribute when present.
5. Taxon Attribute – the attribute for Taxon Name, not the name itself
6. Taxon Latin Attribute – the attribute for Taxon Latin Name, not the name itself
7. Recommended Taxon Name Attribute – the attribute for Recommended Taxon Name, not the name itself
8. Full Recommended Taxon Name – Recommended Taxon Name with attribute when present and the authority
Conditions can be set for Sample Type in the report wizard via Additional Filters on the Layout Selection window as requested in http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=15720#p15720
In v6.18, a filter can be placed on the Location hierarchy and the Names and Addresses list so that only data in the custody of the system is on view. For example to see only Individuals the system is Custodian of, select an individual and click the funnel icon on the active window toolbar then select Preferred (enter criterion as ‘Y’), select a condition and enter the Criterion.
In the Observation hierarchy, a filter can be applied in the same way for surveys but not for survey events, samples or observations.
Note that these filters may be slow where the system is filtering large numbers of entries.
E-mail: s.rankin@btinternet.com
Telephone: 01491 578633
Mobile: 07941 207687
