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Sort out the Mess

You sit down to generate some figures for the practice meeting, Bank manager, newsletter etc. - Into DataMajor - Stored Report and practice statistics, 1st off you look at Breakdown by Species, and you see something like:

You have Rabbit, Lagomorph, Lagomorphs a bit further down there is also lagomorp - hmm getting a percentage of rabbits in the practice is now getting a bit more of a task - adding up numbers and re-working the percentages.

However, there is a way to let DataMajor do it for you, first, make it a little more difficult to have a repeat of the situation.

  1. Force the user to enter a valid breed, colour and sex, use the options: System Management ->
    Setup/Validation/Change ->
    Parameters (Setup) ->
    Fields and Defaults ->
    Options ->
    More ->

    Make sure options 9, 10, 11 are set to Yes.

    it can't happen again

  2. Add all the valid breeds, colours etc. to the list of available breeds - see the Adding a Breed Guide for more details. If you add entries for say 'UnSpecified' it will still give staff a 'get out' option - if you don't they just hit RETURN and you end up with a lot of meaningless breeds/colurs.

Sorting the Species

There are some 'Tidy Up' scripts located in Stored Report -> Tidy Up -> Update options.

The one we will run to sort out the Rabbits is:

Change Species based on Species

Two questions:

Species to set to     Lagomorph
Species currently contains     Rabbit

Run the report and it will list all cards where the existing species is Rabbit and give you the option to change it (the species) to Lagomorph.

You could of course run the script three times as there are in our example three different mis-spellings or use a wildcard option as per:

Rabbit| Lagomorph| Lagomorphs| Lagomorp

As the search is based on species containing the text enter Rabbit| Lago, this will first of all display all the records it is about to change, check it, then when you finish it will show:

If you answer Yes the system will:

Re-running the breakdown by species report, gives us:

This is a lot better, you can repeat the procedure for any other species you want to change.

There are a couple of preset reports that may be helpfull:

Set species to Rodent for rodents - this script will search for rat, ferret, hamster, mouse, gerbil or guinea pig and change the species to 'Rodent'.

Set species to Avian for Birds - this script will search for budgie, parrot, cocka, goose or pigeon and set the species to Avian.

In addition to looking at the species to change the species you can also look at the breed and change the species, for example, using:

Look for Breed update Species, entering a species of Cavia where the breed contains Guin will look for all the Guinea Pigs (just looking for guin to catch some of the mis-spellings) and set the species to Cavia. Enter DSH and set species to Feline (assuming DSH is on your breed for Domestic Short Hair Cats).

By using those options you should be able to tidy up the species in use.

Tidy Up the Breeds

Now you want to drill down and look at specific species, lets look at Cats as an example:

You have 5 different Domestic Short Hairs in there - this makes it a little difficult to get meaningfull figures. This is one specific breed, what about other breeds etc.

The option for this is: Look for Breed CONTAINS change Breed

Breed to set to  
Breed currently contains  
Species (Optional)  

The procedure is exactly the same as you have just done with the species, however, there are a few things to watch out for.

You enter 'Domestic Short Hair' as the breed to set to, enter 'DSH' as the breed contains and ignore the species, hit return, it does pay to check before accepting the results - in this case you will also see 'Staffordshire Bull Terrier' - remember the report is based on CONTAINS - stafforDSHire - yes DSH is contained in staffordshire - case does NOT matter. In this example it is important to include the species.

You also notice it finds another couple of weird ones, Tonkinese X DSH, DSH X PERSIAN and DSH X SIAMESE. This is still due to the 'contains' option, thankfully there are another couple of options that can help:

^ The text must START with
$ The text must END with

So ^DSH means the breed STARTS with DSH, DSH$ means the breed END with DSH and ^DSH$ means the breed is exactly DSH. (See Regular Expressions guide).

Taking that into account, the breed contains question is now ^DSH$ | ^D.S.H running this, updating and re-looking at the totals we have:

This is more like it. You can repeat the procedure for DLH etc. to get the list exactly as you want it.

Getting rid of Unknowns

You run the stats and find some 'Unknown' entries, you find DMH (Domestic Medium? Hair) and want to locate the actual animal records to look at them in more details. How do you do this?

The best option for this is: DataMajor -> Management Related

Select the Species as needed e.g. Feline, enter the Breed e.g. DMH

You can printout the list, look at them on the screen etc.

However, when it comes to Unknown there are times you will not be able to locate then. This is because if the breed (or species) is blank DataMajor and the under lying database will treat then differently to the text 'unknown'. In this case you need to use option 28 'Special', enter either:

for blank breeds use: breed is null
for blank species use: species is null

Misc Update Scripts

Change any weird sex's to UK - Look at the sex field and if it is blank set it to 'UN', if sex is NF set it to FN, if NM change it to MN.

Apply an Admin Lock to any Bad Debt Cards - Check for a BD status field and apply an Admin Lock to the card.