Re: Possible enhancements to Recorder 6 - please contribute your ideas
I’ve looked through the list of enhancements proposed so far and if we had migrated from R2002 to R6 many are probably the sort of things we’d be asking for too. However we have a more basic requirement first:
1) To be able to reliably migrate our records from R2002 to R6
(See http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=422, http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=410 and http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=475 for details)
We’d then like to have back good features of R2002 that were removed, such as
2) The Location “Report” Button,
3) The single column for “observation measurement data” and the single column for “observation measurement qualifier” in the Report Wizard. (We don’t want 33 columns!)
4) We would also like to be able to run the network workstation on our x64 XP machine.
The next two wishes may already be in R6(?) – we haven’t got far enough with R6 yet to check…
5) The ability to simply report on lists of different status, e.g. UKBAP priority species, CROW Section 74, UK protected species, European protected species, RDB, Na, Nb, Red, Amber, etc. without LRCs having to independently maintain rucksacks of standard lists/status.
6) As we do much of our work in MapInfo, direct connection into GIS would be very helpful. (I’ve dabbled with DBMS queries). Records would either have to plot at the centre of their resolution, or be a square polygon of the resolution size. Plotting at the SW corner is of little value. (We don’t need Recorder’s mapping enhanced – we rarely use it).
7a) Hierarchies of Locations and Name/addresses get my vote too. Imports from other organizations need to be isolatable from the main database so they don’t fill it with sites outside the county, duplicates of sites within the county, or duplicate people.
7b) Related to this is the means to tell the import wizard to not match against these. We only want to match against our own site list and people list.
(When I imported some British Dragonfly Society records into R2002 I first hacked the data to prefix all the sites and surnames with “BDS-“ so that the import wizard would never match to them, and I could “isolate/distinguish” their sites and people from ours).
8) Bulk manipulation is highly desirable. e.g. I want to move a set of species from one survey to another because different access rights are needed on the NBN gateway and I want to keep Surveys and NBN datasets equivalent. Even though I can find all the records with a rucksack I can’t then bulk move them to another survey. It’s probably going to be quicker to dump them all out and re-import them.
9) Others have commented on MapMate->R6 imports. We get updates from Moth recorders in MapMate but don’t bother trying to import them into Recorder (2002). (I’ve never really felt any need to do so). They are exported from MapMate to MapInfo, which is where we do most of the work.
No matter which features are decided upon next, R6 first and foremost should be solid and reliable. Our experiences with item 1) and problems I reported earlier with the import wizard discarding data in every 64th record, suggest it is otherwise. I feel it is better to consolidate what is there already before adding too many new features.
Keith Balmer
Beds and Luton LRC