Re: Solving the Recording Card problem
If you use the 'add species' feature to build a recording card and are not meticulously careful in selecting the prefered name from a prefered list then you run the risk of that card crashing R2002. This is a problem that has caused me to waste a great deal of tidying up corrupted cards, and I was disappointed to hear from Sally Rankin that this problem persists in R6.
Although the problem does not cause the exceptions in R6 as it did in R2002, if a Recording Card is built in this way and Common Names or non-prefered names are used, and this card was given to a volunteer running R2002 (because their computer is not powerful enoguh to run R6) then it would cause the system to crash. I appreciate that there is no chance of this problem being fixed in R2002, but I do feel that it should be addressed in R6.
So my suggestion would be that when a species is selected using either a common name, or a synonym the key that is added to the Recording Card (and indeed to the taxon occurence) should be the key for the prefered name - which sounds so rediculously simple it'll probably cost a fortune to implement.
Senior IT & Records Officer,
15 Talbot Road, Talbot Green, Pontyclun, CF72 8AD
www.sewbrec.org.uk, www.sewbrecord.org.uk