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Topic: Incompatability between Recorder versions

I have found a problem with using other people's templates for producing reports

Background- I needed data on a suite of species across the West Midlands, since we are all on Recorder 6 I designed a report template and distributed it to everyone to run expecting identically formatted data from everyone!

NOT SO! My copy of Recorder produced the expected report, three colleague data failed to export the scientific name and one managed to fail on both scientific and common names making their data totally useless - I am guessing the problem is because we are all on different versions of Rec6, but I thought it important to make people aware of this limitation to reuse of Report Templates

Craig

Craig Slawson
Staffordshire Ecological Record

2 (edited by nmrs 06-03-2013 10:11:10)

Re: Incompatability between Recorder versions

I have had similar experience in the past having sent WZD files to external Recorder users and getting feedback to say they don't work! I wonder if this is due to other users not necessarily having the correct REPORT_ATTRIBUTE and REPORT_JOIN keys or similar?

Les Evans-Hill
Senior Data Officer
Butterfly Conservation, Butterflies for the New Millennium and National Moth Recording Scheme

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Re: Incompatability between Recorder versions

The template basically stores SQL, so  I suspect that differences in system versions or in dictionary versions will either produce unpredictable results or cause a system crash. Any users defined functions used must be in the receiving system, as must the report attributes used. Older system which do not have User Survey Restriction table will also fail.  Dictionary differences may cause different taxa  to be selected or taxa to be missed out  in some instances.

Mike Weideli