Thanks for uploading the text file Charles.

The file contains three SQL queries, which are revised versions of the three MapMate queries previously circulated for exporting to Recorder 2002. The "Find bad dates" query has not altered, but in the other two queries the differences are:

- Date field formatted so that it shows real date ranges for any period of time, e.g. a single day date will show as "dd/mm/yyyy", a date range will show as "dd/mm/yyyy - dd/mm/yyyy".

- Abundance, stage and sex fields are concatenated:
-- non-numeric abundance terms are translated - where DAFOR codes have been used they are shown instead of numeric quantities;
-- MapMate also has a "Not recorded" term, if this has been used it will show as "NotPresent";
-- "0", for "Present", is translated into "+";
-- In the Stage field, "1st Summer" etc. is translated into "FirstSummer" to avoid confusion with numeric abundance;
-- In the Sex field "mixed sex group" is converted to "MixedSexGroup" to remove spaces.

I did try stringing together a load of IIf statements to strip out all the spaces from the Stage field, but there are 40 stage terms that have spaces in them, and the query won't run with 40 nested IIf statements! So the best I can do is concatenate the three fields as described above - you'll still need to do an extra editing job outside MapMate to remove any extraneous spaces before import into R6.

The main data fields within MapMate that do NOT get exported in the queries are the fields relating to the "Reference" (equivalent to Recorder's "Survey"). The Reference fields could be added to the queries fairly easily, but not sure how that would get treated on import to Recorder. (And perhaps in Recorder it would be best to have a single Survey that refers to the original source of all the MapMate data?).

Any further suggestions for making this work smoothly will be gratefully received, and ideally I'd like to get the whole "MapMate to Recorder 6 data transfer" doc fully updated, so would be good to hear from anyone who is using this to import into R6.

Martin

One further issue to ponder: all of our incoming MM data is lumped into one large store and it's difficult to distinguish what individuals data have come from. So for instance, I may have one set of data from a recording group and others from individuals sending in records on a ad hoc basis. Ideally I would like to be able to separate out the data and place the recording group's data into its own Recorder survey, and other individual's data into their own separate surveys. However, I've as yet not been able to find a way of separating data by source. It occurred to me that the References field might help?

Any ideas?

Charles

Martin,

I somehow missed your reply here, so my apologies for that.

Regarding sources, I'll give a little further background to the problem. We receive data from several individuals in addition to a major recording group via MapMate. Separating out the individuals is easy enough using the CUK as you suggest. However, there doesn't seem to be a way of distinguishing the records that have come from the recording group as there are many CUKs for each of the individuals using MM within the group. I'm not sure that there is going to be a robust solution to this issue unless Teknica add an attribute to MM entities that store where they last came from (as opposed to where they originally came from). The same issue does exist in Recorder, but is somewhat alleviated through use of surveys as a grouping mechanism for records and also the newer addition of a custodian field.

Charles