major problem; commas in our database

[Nigel Askew]

cool, well thanks again, this is going to save me so much time, and perhaps if someone else comes to you with the same problem it will help them too 🙂

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
pardon my ignorance – could you please explain the difference between commas and semicolons. I was unaware that users should be using semicolons to seperate keywords in notes, instead of commas.

Thanks –
Bob Zelin

[Bryson Jones]

Hey Bob,

This was in the “multi” fields where the system is putting in the separators between multiple keywords out of the pull down list. You just don’t want silly humans typing in a different separator than the system. That’s what caused all of this, mixing separators which is bad for database systems.

There are no bad questions, I have a few I need to ask right now too. lol

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[Rolf Howarth]

This was a fairly technical thread about how to recover from misformatted data, which was entered while CatDV wasn’t configured properly. Normally you don’t have to worry about commas or semicolons!

It relates to user-defined “multi-grouping” fields, which can be used used to enter keywords:

In a normal “grouping” field (perhaps one called “Weather”) you can define picklist values such as “Sunny”, “Overcast”, “Rain”, “Stormy”, “Windy”, “Night” and then when you’re logging you can choose one of these values from a drop down. You can also type a few letters and have it auto-complete, or press the up and down arrows to step through matching values until you see the one you want.

If you want the field to be able to take multiple values instead of a single value make it a multi-grouping field. To edit a multi-grouping field click on the ‘*’ alongside the field and it will bring up a chooser where you can see all the available keyword values and the ones which have been selected. If you tag a clip with both “Rain” and “Stormy” that will be shown as “Rain; Stormy” but the semicolon is just displated as a shortcut so they can be shown on one line, it’s not part of the data.

The problem was what happens if the field was originally defined as a plain text field and someone enters a semicolon, then changes the definition so it’s multi-grouping and needs to fix the data so CatDV knows that they are really separate values.