I am new(ish) to Specify, but have experience with a number of collection management systems. I am mostly using Specify at this point to enter/edit occurrence records (“Collection Object”). While editing occurrence records, I sometimes come across incorrect data in the attached Locality record. I must ensure that the Locality record is not attached to another Collection Object in order to avoid incorrectly editing other records. For Taxon and Geography records, there is a clear way to view all records to which they are attached by clicking Settings > Find Usages. I see no such functionality for Locality records. We have found a workaround for Locality records, but it is very cumbersome (query: Catalog Number > Any; Collecting Information > Locality > ID > Equal > [Locality ID obtained from URL]). Is there a more streamlined way to query on Locality record attachments? If not, could the Find Usages function please be added to Locality records? Many thanks!
One way you could do this is through the Collecting Event table by having the collection object subview visible on the form as below
Am I correct in understanding that this would only work if the collection is configured to have a shared structure for collecting events, and not for embedded collecting events?
Hi @markp,
While you can still add the Collection Objects (CO) subview to an embedded Collecting Event (CE), it should only show a single CO since each CE is supposed to be unique to that CO.
If there are multiple COs that appear under that subview in a collection where they are embedded, it is likely that the database previously had shared CEs before it was switched to be embedded.
Hi,
I can see how this might let you know if there were a ‘number’ of other records pointing to it, but would this be a way to get to a list? (like the other ‘find usages’ features)?
What is shared vs. embedded? In our use-case, we often have multiple specimens collected at the exact same ‘place’. So instead of creating a new locality, an existing one can be reused. So you could have several collection objects ‘pointing’ to the same locality (by locality ID)… It is the case that much of our data was ported from S6, but am curious as to why this would matter??
Shared collecting events will be displayed as a query combo box that allows a collecting event to be reused for multiple collection objects (1:many relationship). This works for some collections where there is not a distinct collecting number assigned to each specimen in the field. In ichthyology, we seine a stream and may encounter many species in that net. The net is the collecting event and is reused for all collection objects created from that event. In cases where each collection object is also its own unique collecting event (herbaria and the like) they use embedded collecting events where a unique collecting event is created for each collection object (1:1 relationship). In this case the collecting event subform is displayed as a form for direct data entry.
But why do this instead of just a ‘find usages’??
Not sure. Was just offering an alternative method.