I think the more useful built-in reports from Mapmate would be good. Could any Mapmate users here give an indication of which reports they'd like to see that Recorder currently doesn't do?

In terms of designations, I need relevant designations (i.e., I don't want ones from NI for example) concatenated into one cell separated by a semi-colon. Need to be able to select the full designation name and designation kind.

Hi Charles,

I can think of plenty of SQL I've written in MapMate that I'd love to migrate to Recorder. Seeing as the 'old' National Scarce Moth Recording Scheme data currently held on MapMate (which is basically UK BAP priority moths) will eventually migrate to Recorder, I will need to have some tools and reports in place to provide 'snap-shot' data, based on the new "Priority Species List (2007)" dictionary, to our Moth Conservation Team.

I've not looked at Recorder's report writing capabilities, nor indeed the inner workings of the Recorder Data Model, apart from the fact it is infinately more complex than MapMate! This is an issue I intend to address sometime during 2008.

Hi

Many thanks for your suggestions - we need to move fairly quickly on these so if anyone has any further suggestions please add them as soon as possible.

Darwyn - one of the CCNs going foward for the next version will cover XML reports being able to utilise rucksacks.

Charles - what sort of fields would you consider essential to go alongside designations, e.g. latin name, date, grid ref, location, location name, recorders, determiner, optional - common name, abundance/measurement info, comments etc? Would you want all records for a given location, location name, bounding box or 10km square or just one row for each species with info on first and last record etc? Or both?

Les - Would be great if you could give more info on the type of query you were writing yourself in MapMate (in terms of the fields you were using and if you constrained the report in anyway, e.g. by date or species etc.)?

Many thanks,

Just noticed a rather obvious omission from the Report Wizard: Sample Type. I know this isn't an XML Report, but I believe it should be fairly easy to add this to the Report Wizard anyway.

Mike Weideli and I have discussed producing a guide for writing XML reports and it is something we would like to do. It would help if we could share the workload although both of us are very busy at the moment. However, as self-employed contractors paid work needs to take priority so it is unlikely to come off the To Do list until funding is available. As far as I am aware, JNCC don’t have any plans to produce anything like this in the near future.

Mike has prepared a preliminary guide and he is happy to make that available. Please e-mail him if you would like a copy, mike@lfield.co.uk .

I included some very basic information in the Help in when I was doing Help updates for JNCC this time last year. It is in v6.10 so you will have it if you have installed Recorder 6 using a v6.10.4 CD but if you have upgraded from an earlier version you won’t have it unless you have installed the revised Help as specified in Sarah’s post 12/10/07, http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=2060#p2060. See Help – Tasks on the Contents tab – Reporting – XML reports. When designing XML reports users can incorporate functions that format Recorder data in a more appropriate manner for reporting. A selection of these are listed at the end of the Network Installation Guide.

Both Mike and I offer training for writing XML reports.

Under contract to JNCC, Mike has been producing a lot of XML reports and functions to be issued with the next release. In that, users will be able to write XML reports to do batch updates and good documentation should help them avoid mistakes.