Can you describe what the issue is you’re experiencing?
I’m honestly not sure if this is a Support or Bug question, but I hope you can help us out nonetheless. We’ve noticed that the options for Observed Behavior in the Encounter Submission form (which is an open-answer text box) are different from the options in the Encounter edit page under Attributes (which is a dropdown with pre-determined options).
It would appear that the only options we have in the Encounter edit page are “breaching” and “feeding” which is probably a carryover from Flukebook. I think I can edit the Encounter edit page options in the commonConfiguration.properties file in GitHub (please confirm), but we still have the problem that these dropdown options don’t apply to the open-answer options in the Encounter Submission page. Ideally, I’d think they would be consistent, but maybe there’s a reason for the difference.
Can you provide steps on how to reproduce what you’re experiencing?
For the Encounter edit page, you can check out this encounter link and go down to Attributes > Behavior and click the dropdown Spotting Giant Sea Bass
I’ve added the suggested options from the SGSB submit page to the dropdown on the encounter page.
I also agree that the options for these two fields should be in parallel. The submit page for other Wildbook’s has the dropdown menu for set behaviors same as the encounter page. I believe this was changed on SGSB during a service contract several years ago along with other submit page changes to allow for broader input by users, but I’m happy to switch it back. Having the dropdown does make thing more uniform and more easily searchable in most cases.
If you go to the search page for encounters you can see the behavior entries already provided by users.
You can provide me more keys to add to the desired set list of behaviors also.
Thanks for making that adjustment to the encounter edit page.
I think we wanted submitters to have more flexibility with the open-entry input for behavior because back then we weren’t sure about the range of possible behaviors. Now that we have a few years of data, we have a better idea and having a dropdown makes more sense.
How much of a lift is it for you to revert back to the behavior dropdown on the submission page? We wouldn’t want to use all the behavior entries already provided by users (the ones visible on the encounter search page), but at the very least the 5 that are on the encounter edit page. With a dropdown added to the submission page, would we be able to go into GitHub and edit the specific dropdown options there and on the encounter edit pages ourselves?
We have some submissions where submitters reported more than one behavior separated by a comma. What if we made it possible to select more than one behavior in the dropdown (both on the submission and encounter edit pages)?
By the way, I did an encounter search where I selected all of the non-standard behavior entries (just to see how many encounters there were), and this is what happened on the results page when I clicked on Results Table:
I found the cause of the error you found. It’s actually one of the dangers of open ended fields for user entry like this! It wasn’t set up to accept certain character combinations, and queries for encounters that
had user defined behaviors with these combinations caused an error.
I’ve got a fix deployed for that so you should be able to search for any of them.
If you have other behaviors you want to add to the properties list go ahead and add them, I’ll deploy when you are finished.
Going back to the old dropdown is not a large amount of effort, but I will need to integrate it with my schedule so please make a feature request for it. The multiple select is unfortunately not supported the way our database is set up currently, it is a single text field. If there are many behaviors noted I’d encourage users to put them in the comments section. Adding multiple searchable behavior tags is an interesting idea though- please make a note in the above feature request and we can consider it for the next generation Wildbook we are developing.
Thanks so much for fixing that error in the search query! I just tried it out and it worked fine.
I’ll confer with the team about other behaviors to add in the properties list, and we’ll let you know if/when those are ready to deploy. We will also add feature requests for reverting to the dropdown on the submission page and multiple option select.
