[Odb-help] ODB Survey Update; Mass Updates; Salutations; Export Bug

[odb-help at lists.democracygroups.org]

Dear ODB Users:

Good Afternoon!

1.  The survey is still in progress; have you filled it out yet?
   This is a really brief survey... all you have to do is go to:
http://surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=78582730018

    We are extending the deadline a couple of hours: you have
until noon tomorrow (eastern time).  We hope to hear from you!
We want to hear from EVERYONE on this list -- not just the
groups who have adopted ODB.


2.  Mass Updates
    Did you ever want to go through the database and
fix a large number of records all at once?  That is what
one of our client groups needed to do.  Their data was entered
without the periods in the abbreviations "St.", "Rd.", "Ave.", etc.
All they needed to do was add the periods.

    It is often most useful to use a database program like
Access (some have reported you can do this in Open Office as we
mentioned 3 weeks ago) to make the updates.  The queries that our
client chose to run were as follows:

UPDATE people SET stname = stname+"." WHERE right(stname,2)="St";

UPDATE people SET stname = stname+"." WHERE right(stname,2)="Rd";

UPDATE people SET stname = stname+"." WHERE right(stname,2)="Dr";

UPDATE people SET stname = stname+"." WHERE right(stname,3)="Ave";

   Keep in mind that whenever you do a "mass update" to a database
there is the potential for you to erase all your data.  For instance:

UPDATE people SET stname = stname+"."

   Would add a period to every street name, even street names that already
had periods.  So it goes without saying that you should BACK UP
your data before doing any "update" queries.  We might add a feature
to let you do update queries from within the software (with the right
password of course) if there is interest.


3. New Version available for testing

We noticed a problem in that the export and import routines of ODB are
sensitive to mouse clicks.  A new version of ODB is available for testing
which fixes the problem.  In the meantime, do not click or minimize
the ODB window during export or you might not get everything you
were trying to export.

We noticed this internally, fixed it, and then received a call from Apeiron
Institute reporting the problem.

Also we thank Anne Eldridge Malone of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend
Health Care who advised us of numerous issues with entering long
first and last names, particularly when the "Title" or "Suffix" field
is used.  For instance the First name field should have allowed 20
characters and it was only allowing 15.  The email field was able
to hold 70 characters but ODB was only letting you type 50.

As a result of our conversation with Anne we went ahead and implemented
a true "Salutation" field as well, and integrated it with export, import, and
thank you note printing.

If you would like to be a tester for the new release, just let us know.

-rich cowan



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