Add custom Sighting ID through the new Report an Encounter Pathway

Feature Requests
,
1

What Wildbook should this feature be in?
Seals Wildbook

What would you like to see?
I would like to be able to add my custom sighting IDs to encounters that I submit through the newly created "Report and Encounter. This feature currently exists in the “Report an Encounter (Classic)” option within the advanced information tab. I do not see its counterpart in the new pathway.

How would this functionality help you?
This would allow me to organize my data by sighting IDs that have meaningful names (include date and location). This saves me time when digging through data. The automatically generated sighting IDs are a random string of numbers and letters which is not helpful for my purposes. This would also make it easier for me to tell Wildbook when two encounters are part of the same sighting as I can type the ID by memory instead of copying and pasting a random string from the encounter I input first. Overall, it would save time and increase the streamline of Wildbook.

2

Good callout! I’m not sure if there was a reason for not including the sighting ID in the new report an encounter page, so I’m waiting to hear back from my teammates for more background. I’ll let you know once I have more details.

3

Thank for your patience! This was a custom field on the report an encounter page (it wasn’t available on all Wildbooks) and the product team wanted to simplify the reporting process to include fields that were most relevant to users.

You can use the Report an Encounter (Classic) option to manually submit encounters with a custom sighting ID. Otherwise the workaround is to edit the sighting ID in the encounter after you’ve submitted it.

  1. Click on the Edit button in the Identity section of the encounter page
  2. Under Manage Occurrence Assignment click the Remove button next to Remove from occurrence
  3. Refresh the encounter page
  4. Click the Edit button next to Identity again
  5. Under Manage Occurrence Assignment enter you ID in the Create occurrence field and click on the create button next to it

Other options are:

  1. Add the Encounter.occurrenceID field in your bulk import spreadsheet for future uploads. This will let you import encounters with a custom sighting ID.
  2. Create your own form using our open-source API
4

Thanks for looking into that! I will most likely just keep using the classic version of Reporting an Encounter.

1 Like