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BioKIC / symbiota-docs

Symbiota software centralized hub for documentation
https://biokic.github.io/symbiota-docs/
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[Feature Request]: Additional ID value: way to avoid breaking up collection names that have commas in them #206

Open themerekat opened 2 years ago

themerekat commented 2 years ago

Symbiota Portal Name

MyCoPortal

Is your feature/tool request related to a problem? Please describe.

From John Hall: "the current field treats commas as a record delimiter. This means that collection names containing a comma will be split onto two lines when records are imported (or restored from a backup). Is there a way to avoid this error?"

Describe the solution you'd like.

No response

Who else has expressed a desire for this feature/tool?

No response

When and how would this feature be used? What are some use cases?

No response

Additional context

No response

themerekat commented 2 years ago

Additional comment "I understand that this field is intended for other catalog numbers assigned by the home or an affiliated institution. However, the National Fungus Collections has also tracked unincorporated herbaria as well as the personal herbaria using the same field."

themerekat commented 2 years ago

Additional context: "For example, we have specimens from the Division of Botany in Canada that do not obviously correspond to a collection in Index Herbariorum. These were entered in our database as, for example:

Division of Botany, Ottawa, Canada F 5397

Or

Mycological Herbarium Science Service, Department of Agriculture, Ottawa, Canada s.n.

We could remove commas from these but we will have to be diligent about removing the commas from all future entries. Otherwise, the entries will become corrupted should we ever have to restore the data in that field. This is, of course, what happened when the field was converted recently. We now have to check hundreds of records for record-break errors.

In addition, the second example is too long for the current field – even with commas removed. We can abbreviate some of the words but there may be instances where abbreviations lead to confusion. If we were to import records without counting the characters in the field, I believe the data would be lost without warning at the time of upload. Symbiota does generate a warning when you enter data directly into the web interface but the warning is pretty subtle and does not appear until after you save the record. Data could easily be lost during entry or transfer. I do not know if data were lost during the recent transfer as a result of this limitation. It seems likely."