I’m uploading records using WB. First I upload the Taxonomy (tree). Then, I upload CO and CE. After that I upload Determination table.
According to WB the table seems fine, but when I check the records, the Taxon field appears empty, with no information.
What I’m doing wrong?
Thank you
Sorry to bother again– can you send the data set upload plan? It is a JSON file that can be exported from the WorkBench data set directly that includes the instructions Specify uses to upload the data to the various fields and tables in the database:
Apologies for the late response. From what you provided, it looks like everything is mapped correctly, but I was able to observe the same issue as you. I can confirm also that it is not a visual bug, as the Determination records do not have any link to the Taxon tree.
Despite the taxa included in this data set not being present in the tree, Specify is not attempting to create these nodes (you can see this by clicking Results in the WorkBench editor:
I found that the issue arises because the “Mapping Options” for the Taxon field are set to “Always Ignore”. This setting is intended to prevent Specify from trying to match the incoming data against existing records, but in this case, it’s causing the importer to ignore the value entirely.
Modifying the mapping to instead use the “Never Ignore” option resolves this issue, and you can see that the taxa are now correctly highlighted in blue, indicating they will be created as new records:
Intuitively, it seems like this should have simply still created new taxon nodes in the tree since no matching nodes were found. The “Always Ignore” setting should only affect the matching logic against existing records, not the creation logic for new ones.
This is definitely a bug, and I thank you for bringing it to our attention. I have filed a report with our development team to get this corrected in a future release.
For now, the solution is to change the mapping option for your Taxon field to “Never Ignore.” This will allow the Workbench to correctly create the new taxon records and link them to your determinations.
Please give that a try and let me know if it solves the problem for you!
Thank you Grant!
I usually select “Always ignore” when I first upload the taxonomy in the tree and then upload the determination table, leaving out some fields such as the “Author” of the genus, for example.
