automatic opening of collectors/herb

[lowfatspread]

could you replace the automatic opening of another collector/herb/det. etc set of fields...

definitely for the collectors /det its a rare occurence that you need to record more than 1 per specimen. The current system often means i'm
typing the collection date into the collectore name ...

could it be replaced perhaps by a control which allowed you to specify how many sets of details you required?

can we also have a facility to copy forward the collectors/herbs entered for one specimen to any additional ones found on the sheet... In many
cases the "handlers" are largley the same , the location or collection date
being the main difference.

[Tom Humphrey]

Good suggestions

Accidentally putting dates in the collector field has been a common mistake. I'd already added a check to warn of dates in this field, but your suggestion makes a lot of sense.

I've just had a look, and 98% of records have only one collector, so there is definitely no reason to automatically open a second collector window.

54% of records have multiple entries for the 'herbarium' field, so I'll leave this as it is at present.

Re. dittoing records
This would also be useful, but I would like to try to avoid making the user interface too complicated - which can be off-putting for new users. Which fields do you think are worth replicating - taxon names, collectors, herbaria but not locality and date?

There are potential problems with allowing dittoing as it can allow spurious entries to get duplicated across records without being noticed. My previous experiences with a museum database system that suffered extensively from this problem influenced my decision not to include dittoing when herb@home was designed. However, given that all fields are visible at once with herb@home, (unlike the other system that tended to obscure many fields), this may not be a problem.

regards,

Tom.

[Tom Humphrey]

The latest alpha version (005n) no longer opens extra collector fields automatically.