Hi Ally (@acoconis),
Nice profile picture!
For guidance on merging Collecting Event records in Specify, please see our user documentation on record merging:
For additional guidance, feel free to reply here with any specific questions you may have. We’re happy to help!
Yes. I have seen this documentation and have merged records as well as agents before. However, this does not seem to be the same process with collecting events. When I bring up a list from a query of all the collection events that I would like to merge and select them, no ‘merge’ button appears as it does with records and agents.
I am also curious as to how to prevent duplicate collecting events when batch loading. I do not have a unique number linking these records (ie. Field number as per the example). However, all records are from the same locality and were collected on the same date.
Thanks.
Thank you for providing some context!
The process for record merging is the same for Collecting Events as Agents, just a different table. It is strange that the button does not appear for you. Can you please confirm that the query you’re working with has Collecting Event as the base table?
When the query is on a base table where records can be merged, the Merge Records button will appear in the options and become clickable once two or more results are selected:
Regarding preventing duplicate Collecting Event records, I believe you are referring to uploading records via the WorkBench. It would help to know if Collecting Events are shared or embedded in the discipline that your collection is in.
Thank you. This is where I was confused. I would like our collecting events to be shared between collection objects if they were collected in the same place on the same date (ie. shared collecting event for mammals collected at the same place on the same date). It appears as though when I am using the workbench to batch load, I can currently only fill in the required column ‘IsEmbeddedCollectingEvent’ as ‘TRUE’. When I set it to ‘FALSE’, it throws an error. Now I see why. The configuration collection or discipline record needs to be modified using SQL to reflect this. Help with this would be much appreciated!
Yes, I can help 
I found that your institution is hosted on the Specify Cloud, which is great! This means we can easily access your instance to change the Collecting Event preference for you.
In your database, I see that the Mammals collection shares the Mammalogy discipline with the Osteology Mammal collection. It is strongly advised to configure all collections in a discipline to the same setting. Is it okay to apply this change to both collections in the Mammalogy discipline?
Once the Collecting Events are set to shared, you will be able to merge records as expected. This will also enable uploading shared Collecting Events across Collection Object records during WorkBench uploads.
Yes, you can change both our mammal and our osteology mammal collection to enable shared collecting events. Thank you so much!
Great, you should see this change in both collections now. I’ve also updated the Collecting Event subviews in the Collection Object form definition to reflect the switch to shared event records. You may need to refresh the page or log out and back in to see this, though.
Let us know if you have any further questions, and please don’t hesitate to reach out to support@specifysoftware.org for additional support.
Thank you. This worked!