Enable creating children for synonymized nodes

Starting in Specify 7.8.4, you can enable a secret preference that allows synonymizing a node that has children and adding children to a synonymized node.

This has been requested by many members of the consortium, including @Ben, @Plarson, @Schuchert , and @HeatherC.

You can enable this functionality by adding this line to your Remote User Prefs file in the App Resources viewer. If you have any questions or need some help, please feel free to send us a message!

Allow Adding Children to Synonymized Parents & Synonymizing a Node with Children

sp7.allow_adding_child_to_synonymized_parent.TREENAME=true

You will need to replace TREENAME with Taxon or any other tree you wish to enable this behavior for.

For instance, if you wished to modify the behavior of the Taxon tree, you would add this line to your Remote User Prefs file:

sp7.allow_adding_child_to_synonymized_parent.Taxon=true
2 Likes

Very interesting! will this also allow a ‘parent’ node (that has a child) to be synonymized to another node?

I ran into this use-case this week. It doesn’t follow all the taxon rules, but relates to legacy and Type nomenclature that we want to maintain (but not encourage further).

Thanks for this insight, I will be looking into learning more about how to personalize these preferences.

Thanks!

Hi @HeatherC,

Yes it will! Once enabled, you will be able to synonymize a node with children.

This will be included in the Specify 7.8.4 release which will be available in the next couple of weeks. If you would like to have the latest changes on your current instance of Specify Cloud, we can push them sooner!

That sounds great, at the moment, it isn’t urgent for us, so no problem waiting for the next release. But, this does give me some ideas for different Tree behaviour that I wonder if it can be customized… will create a new thread and link.

Possible to customize taxon query?

Hi, thanks for this thread. However, I think a big thing which is missing is the hability of the preferred taxon to take into account the synonymy made at a higher rank. If I do synonymize two families, I’d like that this change is reflected on the concerned species : a CO determination should have this change reflected in the accepted field

I do understand why it doesn’t work this way, due to the way the full name is displayed from the preferred id but did you inquiry on a solution for this issue? Thanks