Release Notes for Recorder 6 version 6.18.1
RELEASE CANDIDATE
December 2012
Release Candidate - Additional Information
The release candidate is a version of the Recorder 6 upgrade (Version 6.18 build 259) which has been tested and which we believe to be in its final form, but which
we would like to have installed on a few systems before making it more generally available. If you install the release candidate then you may need to run the final
upgrade version when it becomes available on the JNCC web site.
This zipped file will upgrade Recorder 6 from version 6.14.4, 6.14.5, 6.15.5 or 6.16.2, 6.17.1 to the latest version (V6.18.1). If you have an earlier version of
Recorder 6, you will first need to upgrade to 6.14.4 using the upgrades on the JNCC web site. Please refer below for details of the changes which have been made.
To run the upgrade:
Download and unzip this file to somewhere on your hard drive.
Use Windows to browse to the RecorderUpgrade.exe and double click on it. Note that you will need Admin rights on the computer to run the upgrade.
After the upgrade has run, open Recorder and check the version details in Help-About Recorder 6. This should read '6.18.1.259'.
Associated with this upgrade is Dictionary upgrade www.Recorder6.info\00000015,16,17,18,19,1A.zip . You will already need to have upgraded to Dictionary
00000014 to run this and please note that it will not run on any R6 versions of R6 before 6.18. Also make sure you are using Dictionary Upgrade Kit version 4. This
Dictionary upgrade populates the new Organism table and takes a long time to run. Typically 2 hours, but longer on some machines, so users with slower machines
may consider running it overnight. Do not be concerned if the upgrade appears not to be responding. Details for running a Dictionary upgrade can be found on the
JNCC web site http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-4615 . The four index tables will need to be rebuilt after the upgrade.
Any problem with the R6 or Dictionary upgrade should be reported on the forum. http://forums.nbn.org.uk/index.php#idx3 .
Release Notes
This upgrade contains a number of bug fixes and minor changes. New versions of the standalone and network installation downloads will not be made available for
this release so new users will need to install v6.17, then upgrade to v6.18, and run the dictionary upgrades. Installing version 6.17 of Recorder 6 complies with the
latest Microsoft standards and recommendations for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, and it installs with SQL Server 2008.
Please run the upgrade as specified on forum post
Please note the known problems listed below. If you encounter any problems with Recorder 6, please report them on the Recorder Forum, part of the NBN Forum
http://forums.nbn.org.uk/index.php#idx3 .
This upgrade must only be run on version 6.14.4.212 onwards. If you are running an earlier version you must upgrade to v6.14.4.212 before .running this
upgrade.
Upgrading to v6.18 adds a number of new attributes to the report wizard, including Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Family and Order but these will only be available
when the new Organism table from the Natural History Museum is populated. The software upgrade adds the table and dictionary upgrades 00000016/17/18/19
populate it. 00000015 clears it down in case users have run test versions of the upgrade and 0000001A clears down the indexes to force users to rebuild them. Hence,
users of v6.17 can upgrade their dictionaries to 00000014 but they must not upgrade further without first upgrading to v6.18.
If users have added any of the new attributes to the report wizard themselves using different keys, they will appear twice, so their entries will need to be deleted.
Title, a new field in the Source_File table means NBN Access Database (zipped) exports containing this table aren’t backward compatible, i.e. an export from v6.18
won’t import into v6.17 unless this field is removed. NBN Data (*.xml) exports should be all right but may be slow for large exports.
Unfortunately, the time and resources haven’t been available yet to update the internal help in Recorder 6 v6.18. It will be updated as soon as possible.
The information in black in the Notes column is from Mantis, the bug and change tracking system used for Recorder 6, the information in blue is further comment.
Main changes in Version 6.18 of Recorder 6
ID
Summary
134 IW_Excel2007and2010
Notes
Proposed Change: IW should be able to import data from Excel 2007 and 2010 files.
In v6.18, the import wizard can import data from Excel 2007 and 2010 (*.xlsx) files. See also 325.
Note that this facility is handled by SMImport, a third party component, which does not report back when
opening a file that is locked in Excel, it simply returns back an empty spreadsheet. Therefore, there is no
way Recorder 6 can tell if the sheet is locked or simply empty, so the error message reported in this case
has had to be made rather more generic to cover both cases.
Note that sometimes when starting the wizard, ‘Files of type’ in the Data Source Selection window
defaults to ADO Connection and selecting a file causes Recorder 6 to crash. This can be avoided by
selecting another file type then selecting ADO Connection again. The dialogue box to build the
connection string then appears and the import can be done as normal. Testing found that this only happens
in some installations. ADO Connection is the type used to import data from Access databases.
206 Allow the output of Eastings and Northings for
Requires new output options in the Report Wizard to output Eastings and Northings for a Sample.
Sample from Report Wizard
Forum reference: http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=8166#p8166
In v6.18, Sample Easting SW Corner, Sample Easting Centre, Sample Northing SW Corner, and Sample
Northing Centre are available as attributes in the Sample group in the Report Wizard. Also available are
Event Top-level Location and Sample Top-level Location. These return the parent location for the event
or sample at the top level in the location hierarchy.
Note that other attributes added are listed in 352, 353 and 407.
216 Changing or Adding a Location to an Event or
Sample
Changing the Location on a survey event or sample or adding a new one will in some circumstances
automatically change the grid ref of event or sample. Adding a new Location will always change the grid
ref, while changing it will only do so if the spatial reference of the original location is the same as that of
the event or sample, irrespective of the qualifier. This behaviour can easily lead to the loss of the original
grid ref and needs to be reviewed.
In v6.18, when changing the location on a survey event or sample you will receive a prompt asking ‘Do
you want to update the spatial reference to the centroid of the selected location?’ with the option to answer
Yes or No.
323 Enhancements to external sources for URLs –
funded by Hampshire Biodiversity Information
Centre
1) Allow a new path setting in the Tools – Options dialog for "default external file path".
2) This is the default folder opened when adding an external file source.
3) When displaying the external source files, for any file within this part of the file system do not display
this part of the path, only the relative path within it. This means that it should be much easier to read long
filepaths.
4) The add button for External references displays a dialog that lets you pick a file or enter a URL, and set
a display caption. The display caption works for URLS and files. If the file is picked from inside the
default external file path then the file is shown relative to the path, though the display caption overrides
this.
Implemented in v6.18. When in edit mode, double click or ... provides edit functionality, when in view
mode these open the file or load the URL in a web browser.
324 Location window node enhancements – funded by
Hampshire Biodiversity Information Centre
Add new sort options to the locations window for location file code and location spatial reference. Note
that the spatial reference would be an alphabetical, not spatial sort.
In Tools – Options, add settings for the output for a location node. There are 2 new checkboxes in v6.18, 1
for "Include file code in location hierarchy" and 1 for "Include spatial reference in location hierarchy ".
Although it would be nice to allow the user to build a "template" for output or to choose the order of
fields, it was felt that this would be quite a lot of work and would need to be done correctly across all
node displays, so has been left out for now.
Implemented in v6.18. When these options are ticked the file codes and/or the spatial references will
appear in the location hierarchy on the left and the A-Z sort button on the active window toolbar will
enable users to sort the hierarchy by location name, file code or spatial reference.
325 Allow Exports in Excel 2010 format
Excel exports in v6.17 are in a very old type of Excel file which Office 2010 regards as unsafe. Opening
them is awkward and I've had crashes when trying to save them as a more recent format. Otherwise Excel
2010 won't allow editing. Enabling export to xlsx or even Excel 2003-7 format would be very helpful. Email from user, 16/01/12.
In v6.18, exports to Excel can be done in .xlsx (Excel 2007 - 2010) or .xls (Excel 97 - 2003) format. See
also 134
Note that the maximum number of rows in Excel 2003 and earlier is 65,536. In Excel 2007 and later, it is
1,048,576.
352 Report Wizard attributes – key and metadata fields
available for all main tables
The attributes Key, Entry Date and Changed Date have been added for surveys, survey events and
samples. They are available in a new group called Metadata.
Entry Date and Changed Date have been added for taxon occurrences and conditions can be set for Obs
Changed Date, Obs Entry Date and Obs Key. These are available in the Taxon group under Observation
Metadata. Conditions can also be set for Obs Confidential (Yes or No), Obs Verified (0, 1 or 2) and Obs
Zero Abundance (Yes or No).
The attributes previously shown in the Observation group now appear in the Taxon group under
Observations. They are no longer available for biotope occurrences as they did not work for biotope
reporting.
Consideration will be given in a later release to allowing conditions to be set for more of these fields, and
to including the biotope equivalents, if required.
Note that when setting conditions on Obs Entry Date and Obs Changed Date for taxon occurrences the
date must be input in yyyymmdd format.
Filters can be set on Obs Surveyor’s Ref in the observation hierarchy, using the funnel icon on the active
window toolbar.
Known Problem:
You can set conditions on Obs Changed Date in v6.18 but this only works on the occurrence itself. If a
change only affects the survey event or sample, e.g. changes to location data, the TOcc Changed Date
doesn’t get updated so setting conditions on Obs Changed Date won’t enable you to include observations
changed in this way in reports. You really need to be able to set conditions on the Changed Date on the
survey event, the sample and the TOcc.
353 Report Wizard Output of 10m and 100m grid
squares
In v6.18, Sample 100m Square, Sample 10m Square and Sample Tetrad are available as attributes in the
Sample – Grid square group in the Report Wizard.
382 Implement Organism table for allocating Sort
Codes in ITN
Add the new Organism table to Recorder 6. Include fields as specified by NHM plus Weight, Lineage,
Sort_Level and Sort_Order and System_supplied_data and Organism_Rank.
Use the sort order in the Organism table to populate the sort order in Index_Taxon_Name.
The software upgrade to v6.18 creates the Organism table and dictionary upgrades 00000016/17/18/19
populate it using data from the Natural History Museum. It is designed to resolve a number of reporting
problems in Recorder 6. If you find problems with the sort order, please report them in the Species
Dictionary section of the forum as soon as possible – http://forums.nbn.org.uk/index.php . We hope to be
able to make corrections available quickly as further dictionary upgrades.
407 Report Wizard attributes – Order and Family
requested
The attributes Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order and Family have been added. This was made possible by
the addition of the Organism table – see 382. Note that these attributes will only be available when this
table is populated by dictionary upgrades 00000016/17/18/19.
Recommended Common Name/Taxon Group is another attribute added. This will contain Taxon Group
when otherwise the common name would be the scientific name.
Recommended Taxon Name without Sub-genus is another attribute added. This will contain the scientific
name without the sub-genus when applicable.
Other changes
ID
Summary
Notes
81
Blank taxon_Dictionary for user-added taxa
Issue: Users cannot create new Dictionaries, only add to existing ones. It is sometimes useful to keep all
User added taxa together.
A completely blank dictionary list called ‘ A List to hold User Added Taxa’ is added as part of
dictionary upgrade 0000000Z. It appears as the first list in the taxon dictionary.
100 Installation fails during installation of SQL Server
Express
The installation of SQL Express failed – see http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=1710
Resolved for installations of v6.15 by using the latest version of SQL Server 2005 Express. Not relevant
for new v6.17 installations. See note added to bottom of
http://forums.nbn.org.uk/mw2/index.php?title=Preparing_a_custom_Recorder_CD for a degree of
clarification (Wiki: Recorder – Recorder 6 – Application User Information – Adopting Recorder in new
countries – Preparing a custom Recorder CD (link in first paragraph))
101 User Survey Restriction isn't working on the
Observation Hierarchy if the Organise Survey By
tag option is selected.
Issue: If the option is set to Organise Surveys by tag, the Surveys will show even if they are set in Users
Survey restrictions as not being available for the users. The Survey needs to be included in a tag for this to
happen. Removing the tag in these situations causes an unhandled error.
Forum reference: http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=1723
In v6.18, users can’t view surveys which they do not have permission to access, even if the surveys are
tagged and survey tags are switched on.
193 XML Report Sq5 not working correctly
This report should return records input after a date specified. It is running, but the selection based on date
entered is not working.
A modified version of JNCC_Sq5_Square_NewRecords.xml is supplied with v6.18.
217 Batch Update Det1 is not working
Batch update Det1, fails to run because a variable it uses is wrong. Also some other problems, including
not dropping the temporary table.
A modified version of JNCCDet1Determinations.xml is supplied with v6.18.
314 Width Property of eSpatialRef control: value
cannot be changed
Whilst testing Mantis 270 in Germany, problems were found when changing the width property of the
eSpatialRef control in resizable windows: when the user resizes the window (the form), the control jumps
back to its original width.
It occurs both, when the width property is changed using the language manager
as well as in add-ins. Since v. 6.14.1. Fixed in v6.18.
320 Picking a coordinate on the map should show a
temporary marker
Forum reference: http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=2776
A temporary marker appears when a polygon is selected (e.g. using restrict to polygon in the report wizard
and using the search icon) – the polygon is selected, but is no longer highlighted. Fixed in v6.18.
321 Import Wizard restricted values on measurements
problem.
Sometimes there can be interactions between the allowed values for different measurement units, so that
values which are allowed on more than one unit get flagged as errors when they should not be.
Fixed in v6.18. See also Mantis 404.
Known Problem:
Import wizard testing revealed a problem of TOcc Data not importing when errors detected by ‘Validate
Columns’ are corrected. If a row contains no errors at all the TOcc Data imports correctly. If a row
contains errors that have to be corrected, then the TOcc Data doesn’t import correctly, regardless of what
column the error is in.
333 Update of Documentation
The internal help in Recorder 6 for v6.18 will be made available as soon as possible.
340 Standalone install fails on Windows XP
On Windows XP, you get an error when running Recorder 6 after install:
"I have just discovered that there is a problem with a standalone installation under XP. After installation
Recorder 6 fails to start with an error message that the Local Image file path is missing or incorrect. This
problem doesn’t occur with Windows 7 install or with a Network installation on XP. The file isn’t in the
folder specified in the registry. Removing the registry entry and opening Recorder solves the problem.
The local image path on start up is C:\Documents and setting\All Users\Documents\Recorder 6\User
Files\User Dictionary Images
If I delete this entry and start Recorder again the path becomes
C:\Program Files\Recorder 6\User Files\User Dictionary Images"
Fixed in v6.18. The Windows XP install does not make use of public documents etc. for file storage, but
the code for pointing the registry settings to the correct folders did not acknowledge this.
341 Addins are failing to install
When attempting to install an addin the message ‘not a valid com object’ is displayed. The process then
continues and reports that installation is complete, but this is not the case. If the addin file is copied to the
Addin folder of R6 then it will install on some systems. However, this does not always appear to work.
http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=2926 has further details.
Fixed in v6.18.
349 Table name for Access export defaults to Select
See http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=12274#p12274 post 17.
When exporting to Access via the export via other formats from the Report Wizard, the default name of
the table is ‘Select’. If users forget to change this, then writing Select queries in Access is problematic.
In v6.18, the default name of the table is ‘Export’.
350 When adding data for individuals have to save
before proceeding
When you are adding a new person, or updating existing information, you have to save each tab before
you go onto the next one, otherwise it loses all of the information. For example, once you have added or
edited information in the ‘Individual’ tab, you have to save it, then click the edit button before you can go
to the ‘Addresses’ tab. http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=3189
Fixed in v6.18
351 Related data on location
If you select a Location in the locations hierarchy and then view related names and addresses it takes you
to the names and addresses page filtered to those names who appear in Designations and Other Info –
Tenure. This is as it should be, but if you then click the ‘Show All’ button it does not cancel the filtering
and show all names. The Show All button does disappear however as it would if the filter had been
removed. http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=3122
Fixed in v6.18
354 New Location within 2km not listing correct sites
If a new Location is within 2km of an existing location and the option is selected to display the location
then the display includes locations which are well outside the 2km zone.
Fixed in v6.18.
383 Rucksacks failing when taxa with user defined
names are included
If a user assigns their own common name to a taxon and then includes this taxon in a Rucksack there is
initially no problem, but if the user then adds any other taxa to the Rucksack and saves the change, then
the next time the Rucksack is opened R6 fails with a message that the Rucksack has been deleted.
This appears to be because the Rucksack is including the TLI key twice. This may be because in these
circumstances there are duplicate entries in ITN.
Fixed in v6.18.
390 Expanding a survey crashes if event has no
location info
Although an event should always have some locality info (grid ref, location or location name) if input via
Recorder, this is not always the case when importing collections related info. Expanding the survey node
in the observations hierarchy causes a crash if there is such an event.
Fixed in v6.18.
394 Measurement Unit Allowed Values Empty value
problem
If there are allowed values defined, it is a problem to allow empty measurement data to be entered.
Related to 321 and 404.
Fixed in v6.18.
395 Export filter doesn’t accept local German spatial
reference notations in bounding Bbox
It’s not possible to enter or pick the Spatial Reference with German Language settings in the Export
Filter’s sample tab.
Trying to pick coordinates of the north-east and south-west corners of a box from a map results e.g. in
47.70005N, 7.50932E (LTLN)
2523406.95, 5439289 (GKr2)
When the filter is saved (click on OK), it’s converted into local delimiters and in most cases (?) an
unhandled error (exception number 15, exception class unknown, exception message unknown, see
attached file) bit in some cases the message “Der Raumbezug wird nicht erkannt. - The spatial reference is
not recognised.” occurs.
Some users reported that Recorder has crashed.
Fixed in v6.18.
396 Merge error exposes an error handling glitch
See http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=3634. This issue is not about the error specifically, but the
fact that this error was originally intended to display as a full error dialog with debug info, but is
appearing just as a normal message box, hence no possibility of working out the source of the problem.
On investigation a bug was found in the error handler which has been there a while. Some messages
intended to display as error dialogs with a full error dump available are being unintentionally converted to
message boxes, losing access to the dump. This issue involves fixing it, but may result in some errors that
were best left as normal messages reverting to the full dump version.
Fixed in v6.18.
404 Import Wizard allowed values on measurements
problem
When testing Mantis 321 in v6.18.1.255 it was found that blank cells in TOcc Data columns for
measurement units with allowed values (not including a space) were highlighted in red indicating that
they were invalid. However, just floating the cursor over the cells removed the red highlighting and
allowed the import to proceed. This also happens in v6.17.2.251. If blank cells are to be allowed they
shouldn’t be highlighted in red. Adding a space as an allowed value on the measurement unit stops blank
cells being highlighted in red.
In v6.18, the import wizard no longer highlights blank cells in TOcc Data columns in red for measurement
units with allowed values that don’t include a space(s) as an allowed value. This means that a space(s) is
an allowed value regardless of whether or not it is listed for the unit in the measurement types term list.
This is considered acceptable so this issue is being closed – to be re-opened if users disagree.
406 Recording card (Place card) crashes when taxon
occurrence comment is NULL
When reloading sample data into a recording card (Sample – Load into Record Card....) and save the
changed values, an error message pops up, Clicking continue application lets you go back to the
Recording card, but you need to close it (without saving) to continue.
The problem only comes up, if a taxon occurrence comment column is integrated in the recording card
and there are NULL values in the taxon_occurrence comment field of at least one record.
Fixed in v6.18.
Sally Rankin, JNCC Recorder Approved Expert
8 December 2012