Charles

I think there is a related question - when providing a report that lists species records, how do you flag the range of designations for each species? I find reports that allow the customer to, at a glance, see if something is notable are preferred i.e. I would not want to provide a separate list of designations for the species. I also don't want to flag up that, say, a species is on a Northern Ireland wildlife schedule!

The way I'm getting around this is to assign a code (up to 3 characters) for each 'significant' designation (e.g. BD1 for Birds directive Annex 1) and to concatenate all significant designations for each species (separated by spaces) e.g. W5a NS BD1. This data which is generated using an Access query from the Recorder designation table is stored in a separate table which can then be linked to the records. To search for say RDB records a query is set up that searches for the relevant codes. By using this concatenated designation field it is possible to list all designations in a way that takes up minimum space on reports.

Well, what I do for for RDB records is specify a complex filter in the Report Wizard to give me all records that have a Taxon Short Name beginning with RDB. Because constraining by geographic area (bounding box or polygon) is essential, I can't use XML Reports unfortunately. Once designations get involved in the Report Wiz process like this, things get rather slow, depending on the size of the geographic area (or bounding box).

I also constrain designation types using the Taxon Status Kind. I've uploaded a little XML Report that lists all of the designations along with their Kind and Description. You can download it from the uploads page. Be warned though, there's a custom function in there, which can be found on the Database Journal website. You'll need to install this and make it executable to the various Recorder database roles before the report will work. John, is there a convenient way of making a custom function executable to all of the roles? It's a bit fiddly having to do each one manually in EM.

To run the report, select Report > Run and choose View Designation Types.xml from the dropdown.

Another question to John: does the report wizard do the Index_Taxon_Group join you mention?

Finally, Rob's idea of concatenating abbreviations seem like a good solution to the designation overload problem. I don't see why concatenating taxon status kinds wouldn't be a solution of sorts. What I do know is that there does need to be something a lot let granular than the current system of selecting each specific designation required for output. Performance could well be an issue, but I think this could be solved with an index table perhaps.

What do others think?

Charles

Thanks John, that's very useful indeed. I'm encouraged by the possibility of the designations quirk being ironed out; can anyone at JNCC or NHM confirm this? If this quirk is fixed, then then using the report wizard for designations reporting should be much more reliable. Couple that with the fact that XML Reports is soon to have geo-spatial selection capabilities, things are looking up.

Charles

Our approach is not to do it Recorder at all. This is because we started with Recorder 3 and we extracted the data and put it into a spreadsheet which has lookup lists for all the usual designations which we amend and add to as necessary. Now new data added to Recorder 2002 is extracted and put through the spreadsheet and finally imported into Mapinfo which we use for most data searches.