I attempted--and failed--to upload a batch of records to iRecord from a .csv file today. For some reason it would not recgnise Caloptilia honoratella, and the species was not in the dropdown list. Yet there are records in iRecord of Caloptilia honoratella, so it's a mystery why it wouldn't acccept it.
As there is no option to drop a species at this stage in the upload process, rather than start all over again and remove it from the spreadsheet, I decided to change it to a random Caloptilia species that was on the list and delete it later. However I never got the opportunity to do so as the server failed to respond in time, so nothing got uploaded. What a waste of time!
Hi Phil,
ReplyDeleteI have just put my iRecord account into training mode (which I use when I'm testing things), and I tested the recording of Caloptilia honoratella using 1) The "moths" species recording form, 2) The general recording form and 3) importing a CSV. All three tests were successful: the system knows about and accepts this species.
My experience when systems flag a problem and reject a value that is supposedly correct is that in most cases it is because what the human eye/brain reads is not what the system is seeing. Examples are where what I'm entering/importing contains trailing/leading spaces (or two spaces instead of one or a space that is a similar but special character such as a tab or a non-breaking space), or spellings with Unicode characters that look similar to but aren't the same as "standard" letters (1/I/l [one/eye/ell] depending on the font, or 0/O [zero/oh] or even A/А [ay/alpha). There is an almost limitless number of "real" differences, plus the brain can auto-correct what is actually a mispelled wrod.
I suggest that you open your CSV in Excel (or similar app). Then find a spare cell and enter the equation =A1="Caloptilia honoratella" (change A1 to the cell reference to the rejected species name). Type that formula, carefully, by hand and don't copy/paste the "Caloptilia honoratella" part from anywhere, just in case that source is defective. If the result of the formula is FALSE, then you know that there's a dodgy character in the name. If the result of the formula is TRUE, then neither of us is any the wiser!
Thanks Tim,
ReplyDeleteI have encountered the issues you describe before, so I'm aware of the leading/trailing space problem etc. But sadly, in this case, we are none the wiser, because the result was TRUE!
In fact there is a general problem with scientific names occasionally not being up-to-date, e.g. Ectoedemia septembrella rather than Fomoria septembrella. And I had a similar problem with Common Plume, which it couldn't find, so I had to use the scientific name. It may be that the reason is that I have chosen iRecord Moths as the list to use, rather than the Master List, though I can't really see why, but I'll check that out tomorrow.
Ah - you may well have identified the problem! I initially tried uploadloading CSVs back in January using the Moths list and encountered problems before I switched to the Master List. I was reminded of this when I switched into training mode for this test and found that my last "training" record was for Dyseriocrania subpurpurella: I now remember that this was rejected with the Moths list, but it sailed through with the Master List.
ReplyDeleteI'll let you know!!
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