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NHMDenmark / DanSpecify

Important files regarding the Danish instance of the Specify database system for collections digitisation and management, plus placeholder for issue tracking. Guidelines, manuals and other kinds of documentations will be gathered on the wiki.
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Serious problem with screen forms #265

Open FedorSteeman opened 5 months ago

FedorSteeman commented 5 months ago

As reported by @Schioette :

"I have discovered that something I thought was only a minor problem with the Specify 7 screen forms is more serious. My previous discovery (I remember having discussed it with Zsuzsanna) was that when switching forward in a row of forms found in a search, Specify would repeat the determination date from a previous form, if the next record displayed did not have a determination date. It is purely a screen phenomenon. The value is not really in the database in the second record. This can be seen if you afterwards search specifically for that record, but the phenomenon is misleading.

I just found out (and I should have thought of that earlier on) that the phenomenon is more general. It occurs also in date fields for collecting events, and it actually today made me make a blunder, which I was fortunately able to backtrack. I was examining collecting dates for some dredgings off North America when I realized that they had a habit of being the same for totally different collecting programs. This can of course lead us to handing seriously wrong information on to potential loan takers etc.

I have a slight, sneaking fear that the phenomenon can go beyond date fields. I have had at least one case recently where I afterwards found it curious that a number of stations had had the same ‘verbatim station number’, but I was unable to reproduce my search. I hope it was just my imagination."

The issue has been spotted in the determinations field, but may be more wide-spread. It's when adding a new determination, the value of the date field of the previous determination is carried over to the new one.

E.g. say we have the following determination with a set date:

image

When pressing the + button to add another one, the date field is pre-filled with the previously set value:

image

This will need to be reported to Kansas, as this is a software bug.

Sosannah commented 4 months ago

Kansas was contacted.

Sosannah commented 4 months ago

@Schioette Kansas was unable to recreate this behavior in the latest production version of Specify 7 (7.9.3), and pointed out that this was an issue sometime during 7.7's development, but it has not been encountered since.

As the upgrade of our system is very close now, we are going to revisit it after the server upgrade.