1 Reply by DaveSlade

  • DaveSlade
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  • Registered: 15-05-2006
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Re: Updating the R2002 Species Dictionary

As I understand it there are no plans to update the species dictionary for Recorder 2002.
If this is the case, is there are way of exporting Checklists from Recorder 6 so that they could be imported to R2002? Ideally such imports would over-write existing entries where lists have been updated in R6.

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 DaveSlade

  • DaveSlade
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Re: Updating the R2002 Species Dictionary

With a bit of trial and error, ( and plenty of backups!) I've managed to get some of the updates to the R6 species dictionary into R2002.

The new lists are all contained in the Rec6v6_7_2.mdb (Access 2000) database which comes in the 6.7.2 update.
So what I did was convert this database to Access 97 to avoid messing up the R2002 databases, then opening up each table in turn, copy the contents into the corresponding table in the R2002 databases.

Not all of the rows will copy across, and in each case I preserved the paste errors table to double check whether this was due to the key already being present or due to a referential integrity being compromised. This also gives me the opportinuty to check for alteration to existing entries, but I'm saving that pleasure for another day.

Having rebuilt the various indexes, I'm happy that some of the new lists are now available to me, but I've not yet managed to get all of them - in fact only a third of the new Taxon_list_Items have copied successfully.

I'll keep you all informed on my progress.

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

3 Reply by DaveSlade

  • DaveSlade
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Re: Updating the R2002 Species Dictionary

Another thing to be aware of if you try this yourselves is that the new lists require some of the fields to be increased in size. TAXON.ITEM_NAME for example needs to be increased to 75 from 60 characters. You may not be able to alter the field size directly, but this can be worked around by creating a new field NEW_ITEM_NAME and running an update query:
UPDATE TAXON SET NEW_ITEM_NAME = ITEM_NAME
Then you can delete the old ITEM_NAME and rename the NEW_ITEM_NAME.
This will also require the deletion of an Index which can simply be added in again afterwards.
This has added a few more species that failed to copy on my first attempt.

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