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Autofill fields
I’ve been working a bit with linked hierarchy pick lists and they’ve been working quite well. I’ve set up two fields, country and city. I was wondering if a user fills out the city first can the country field be automatically updated to the correct value? In most circumstances there will only be one country per city (obviously there may be a few cities in the world with duplicate names, but in that case the user can select it).
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9 Replies
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CatDV doesn’t have the capability of creating “relationships” in that way. Besides, if you did, you’d need to import a list of cities and then their related countries. (Yes, of course many db programs have this) but since it’s a Production Asset Manager, CatDV hasn’t really had to deal with this sort of thing much, from what I can see.
These lookups have been requested and I’m sure someday might even find their way into the product but that’s generally a feature for a larger MAM system. (read more expensive and complex).
I do some autofills on certain rigs by using the Worker to automate them but it’s tedious work and certainly not for large data sets like a city/country field set.
Short answer, those lookups are harder than they look to create.
Besides, will it really know the difference between Rome GA, Rome AR and Rome Italy? 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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Actually, yes it does 🙂 You can create linked fields so that what you choose in one drop down (eg. Country) affects what’s shown in the other (eg. city). If you fill in Country first then City will only show cities from that country, but if Country is blank the the City drop down will show a tree listing countries and cities. If you choose a value from there it will populate both fields (but again, only if Country is blank).
To set this up, define the first drop down Country as a normal Grouping field, then define City as a Linked Hierarchy field, and give it a name of City:Country (which means display the label “City” but tell it that the contents depend on the field called Country).
For the City pick list values you need to enter them in the form of a tree, eg.
USA/New York
USA/Los Angeles
USA/San Francisco
USA/Denver
USA/Atlanta
USA/Washington
United Kingdom/London
United Kingdom/Bristol
United Kingdom/Manchester
United Kingdom/Stratford-upon-Avon
France/Paris
France/Marseilleetc.
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Rolf, I’m thrilled to be wrong! New stuff. 😉
But to clarify, you have to enter them as such, yes? As in, we can’t have a db full of cities with country lookups. But if they are manually entered, the fields “filter” in a sense. Yes?
If so, I think we need to all get started pitching in on City/State/Country layouts for import. 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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I’ve already started this. I’ve found some free city country sql imports, then wrote a simple php script to output them in the format catdv likes. Once I get a chance I’ll upload the text file to this thread. Thanks heaps for the tip!
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I can confirm that the solution by Rolf works. There seems to be one little bug though. If you actually drop down the city list and select the name of the city, it will automatically populate the Country field.
If you start typing in the name of the city and the correct one shows up, then press tab to go on to the next field the country field will not populate. I know in the javascript world that’s a difference between an onclick event and an onchange.
Anyways just thought I’d report my findings. Thanks again for the tip. I think at the moment it should work well for us especially since we would mark many clips at a time for one city.
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Gosh gee wiz a city country one could be fantastic one to share. I suspect we will see more sharing with version 9.0. This field type is also particularly good for sports and generally for “people” values that may have a title, location or department they belong too:)
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Just in case anyone needs it I’ve attached the text files. One has Country/Cities and the other just the countries. I’ve added some extra villages for Papua New Guinea as thats a focus of ours (that’s why you’ll see them at the top of the document).
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Thanks for the explanation. This is great news.
Can CatDV relate one Grouping field (with picklist) to a second Linked Hierarchy field when both required multiple entires? For example, is there a way to relate a Grouping “Creator Role” field with a Linked Hierarchy “Creator” field? I’ll use The Shining as an example:
Creator Role__________Creator
Director______________Kubrick, Stanley
Writer________________King, Stephen
Actor________________Duvall, Shelley
Actor________________Nicholson, JackForgive the complex question, but I think it’s something folks could leverage to reduce the number of fields needed in a database. Is this what the “Multi Hierarchy” option is for?
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A hierarchy field can be either linked or multi but not both.
A linked hierarchy is where the choices in the drop down are limited based on what’s selected in another field, eg. a list of players depending on the team that’s selected.
A multi hierarchy can be used for a structured vocabulary of keywords, for example you might want to tag a clip of a dog playing with both Animals > Domestic > Dog and Leisure > Ball.
For people who are curious about the internals, eg. when writing worker scripts, this will be stored in the database as “Animals/Domestic/Dog\nLeisure/Ball” but displayed as “Dog; Ball”.
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