I was testing the Sighting search functionality and noticed that there’s a field in the search criteria called “Field study site”. The list of sites appears to be a mix of our original location IDs and some other sites and I have no idea where these are coming from.
So I looked into 2 of the sites listed:
- Mfuleni Section Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve
- Ukuwela Section Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve
and found that they were entered by a user into the location ID field in this bulk import.
Even though these are not part of the official list of location IDs, there is no error message to indicate this to the user and the system still ran matching against these encounters, even though they have an incorrect location ID.
I’m not sure if this latter is a bug or intended functionality but it results in the user being unaware that they have made an error in the location ID field.
So would it be possible to change this as follows:
Add a validation step in the bulk import process that checks the location ID values against the list in the system and then highlights that error in some way to to the user prior to them committing their bulk import to the database2.
If that’s not acceptable, can we prevent identification from running on any single encounters & bulk imports if the location ID in the encounter doesn’t match one of the standard ones in the list
Also, I’d say it’s a bug to have the “Field study site” (which I believe is this field in the database “Occurrence.fieldStudySite”) be able to be populated by an entry in the “Encounter.locationID” field in an upload template.
thanks
Maureen