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Old 12-16-2007, 11:13 PM
ashwken ashwken is offline
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Join Date: 10-16-2005
Location: Blairsville, GA USA
Posts: 431
Workflow for a Distributed Database

The project I'm working on is a Contact db (people and vendors, about 500 records) for a local non-profit (Habitat for Humanity, if it matters).

The maintanance (add, update, delete) for this db will be handled by a single person, and the db can be distributed via the UR Viewer.

One of the tasks for this db is the assignment to an individual to contact each of a group of records (A*, B*, C*...) - update-verify contact info and level of desired participation (which "needs" of the organization can the Contact fulfill).

One potential workflow path is to disbtibute the whole db via the UR Viewer with the assignment of "You work on all Last_Name = A". Because you've distributed via the UR Viewer direct edits of the data are not possible (but printing is allowed), which raises the need for an Interview Worksheet.

An Interview Worksheet could be generated prior to making the interview call.

An Interview Worksheet can be generated by selecting an individual Contact Item in either the Data Explorer or the Search Result Pane, then Print | Item Attributes. This will print a two column Report (Attribute Name - Attribute Value) grouped by Attribute Category - the same as what's revealed in the Attributes Pane (Ctrl-4) for the Item.

I'm running into a couple of problems:

First (see above post), if I choose to track the "needs" of the organization via User-Defined Keywords, keywords are NOT Attributes and will not showup in the above report. So, regardless of however elegant the use of keywords are, it would seem that these "needs" should be tracked as Attributes.

The second problem, and perhaps this has been mentioned previuosly, is that I can't print the above report against multuple selections. The Item Attributes report will print as desired (and described above) for a single selected Item, but for multiple Items it only generates the first record and not all data is shown for the first record.

It would be useful in this workflow to distibute the assignment as an Interview Worksheet Packet, i.e., for a Search Result select all records, print the Item Attribute Report to a pdf - each page of the pdf should be an Item and it's Attibutes, distribute pdf to the volunteer tasked, the modified paper report is returned to the db mgr for entry.

Just some ramblings...

Last edited by ashwken; 12-20-2007 at 02:56 AM.
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