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Topic: Survey names

Hi,
Just a quick question. Is it ok to change the name of an active survey on the warehouse? Apart from the first few that I created, I have prefixed CEDaR_ to the survey name and would like to do this for the few I didn't do at the beginning.
Cheers,
Fiona

Fiona McCrory
CEDaR Website Officer
www.nmni.com/cedar

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Re: Survey names

Hi Fiona

As far as I know this is okay and would only affect presentation. I do have one question in my mind and that is whether the cache_occurrences table would be updated by this change. If not, old records might appear in reports with the old survey name and new records with the new survey name. Do you have a test set up using the testwarehouse where you could try it first?

Regarding presentation, some reports, such as that for iRecord verification, give the source of the record as Website Name | Survey Name. From this perspective, it is better if the survey name complements the website name rather than repeats it.

Jim Bacon.

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Re: Survey names

Thanks Jim,
I don't really have anything ready on the test warehouse to test with and, given there may be issues, I think I will leave the survey names as they are. It is a purely cosmetic change and therefore unnecessary but I was interested enough in what the implications might be to ask. As you say, complementing rather than repeating is the key :)
Many thanks,
Fiona

Fiona McCrory
CEDaR Website Officer
www.nmni.com/cedar

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Re: Survey names

Hi Fiona
The change to the survey title should indeed trickle down to the cache_occurrences change so I don't think there is any problem here. If the survey is large then it might take a little while for this update to happen, but other than that I can't see any problems.

As Jim says, the source of the record is shown in reports as Website name | Survey name. However I also note that this representation of the record source automatically strips the website name from the start of the survey title as long as the 2 are exactly the same. This might influence your decision of prefix to use. Bear in mind that the output of reports looks a bit better if this combined source field is not too long.

Best wishes
John

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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Re: Survey names

Thanks John, I'll give it more thought before making any decisions.
Fiona

Fiona McCrory
CEDaR Website Officer
www.nmni.com/cedar