1 Reply by SOLL-ak

  • SOLL-ak
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  • Registered: 19-12-2011
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Re: Submit Sightings Queries / clarification

Submit Sightings Queries / clarification re the ability to select which data entry fields (attributes) are visible depending upon choice of 'species' or other 'check' boxes

1    Submit sightings: How do you get the entry boxes (custom attributes) to only appear if a particular ‘species’ is being recorded e.g. if the ‘species’ chosen is ‘orchard’  then I want the attribute ‘Orchard – fruit grown’ and ‘Orchard – cultivation type’ fields to appear, but not if someone is recording a pond.  (as these fields are not relevant.

2    Warehouse – Terms Lists / Parent Child options  Clarification?  I noticed that there are parent and child Terms pertaining to the ‘Terms Lists’ used in the look up option?

3   Submit sightings: Making a new tab by using the create block in the warehouse and moving some of the attributes within the block (tab in submit sightings).  Is it possible to make the appearance of the ‘tab’ (block) dependent upon which ‘species’ is ticked e.g. if Orchard is ticked as a ‘species’ then the orchard tab is visible, but the ‘water feature’, ‘hedgerow’ and ‘woodland’ tabs are not visible. FOR NOW within the site ‘orchard’ installation I have put things in ‘blocks’ e.g. landowner attributes (questions) together. Orchard attributes together, Woodland attribute etc..

4  Is it possible to have more than one 'submit sightings' on the same indicia sight e.g. if I wanted to have primary links on the home page to both the damselfly recording sightings and a separate link to the 'orchard' recording.    These would be separate databases within the warehouse ??  And would it be possible to ever combine the data from both databases on to one reporting map?

p.s. I know orchards and ponds are not species, but for our purposes I'm 'pretending' - in order to test out Instant Indicia.  I think I need to better understand the options to use 'locations' too!?
Thanks
Anne

2 Reply by Jim Bacon

  • Jim Bacon
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Re: Submit Sightings Queries / clarification

Hi Anne.

You have a squarish peg and we have a roundish hole, I think, but everything is possible in the world of programming. There are two answers to your questions one of which is about making the peg rounder and the other is about making the hole squarer.

For the benefit of other readers, we are referring to a Drupal data entry form entitled Submit Sightings using the MNHNL Dynamic 1 prebuilt form.

1a. To make your problem fit Indicia you would create two surveys, an orchard survey and a pond survey. You would then have two forms, one for each. There is no need to show and hide particular bits of a form.
1b. To make Indicia fit your problem you would write some JavaScript that would be specific to your form. It would look for the species selection and then show and hide particular fields. This is allowed but you would need to do the coding yourself or employ a contractor as this is not reusable by the rest of the community.

2. I've never used this. Conceptually you might have, for example, a list of countries and each country could have a child list of counties and each county could have a child list of parishes. Then, on a form, you could have hierarchical selection where choosing a country then gives the corresponding list of counties and choosing the county gives a corresponding list of parishes. Users of the client_helpers library will see that the select function has options for connecting it in a hierarchical fashion. I've never tried that myself either.

3. Effectively this is the same question as 1 with the same answer. A more generic solution does occur to me where there is a new attribute added to the Form Structure in the User Interface section of the settings that would show or hide a control based upon the value of another control. I'm not sure how great an idea that is and I'm not sure that we would be dropping everything to implement it.

4. You can have any number of recording forms on your website, as implied by my answer to question 1. To clarify some terminology, the warehouse is one database. Within that database each sample (or sighting) belongs to a survey and each survey belongs to a website. (There are database tables of samples, surveys and websites.) Your website can access all the records that belong to it and can report across surveys. Thus it is absolutely feasible to overlay records from the damsel survey on the orchard survey. All that requires is the appropriate report query to be written. However, that requires a bit of skill.

Jim Bacon.

3 Reply by johnvanbreda

  • johnvanbreda
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Re: Submit Sightings Queries / clarification

Hi Anne
A couple more comments on this lot:
2) Another usage of the hierarchical termlists. If, for example, you had a termlist of sampling methods, you could have high level categories such as "light trap" or "quadrat", then beneath those you'd create terms such as "actinict light trap" or "mercury vapour", plus "1m quadrat" or "50cm quadrat". Then, when reporting, you'd be able to do queries such as "list all records that were from a light trap" or "list all records specifically from an actinic light trap". As Jim mentioned, this is not really being used yet, but we planned it into the model anyway as it is likely to be useful in some cases.
3) Agree with Jim's idea - this would be fairly useful if you could like a tab, block of controls or single control's visibility to the value of another control. Another use for this would be a list of terms to pick from, e.g. for weather conditions with options "sun", "rain" and "other" - when you select "other" a box could appear to input details in.
4) I think one of the things you wanted from this question was not just that you can, but how. If you select Content management > Create content > Indicia forms then select from the various form types available you can build any number of new forms. This is slightly more complex than the "Instant Indicia" way but still reasonably easy. This was covered in the tutorials when you built a map. One quick way of learning how to do this would be to open 2 tabs in your browser, one for creating a new form, then one for the Edit page of your existing Submit Sightings form. Then you can transcribe across all the settings to duplicate the form, and create a new survey on the warehouse to link the second form to.

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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