on-the-fly creation of new lookups.
How difficult would it be to add the ability to add a lookup when you are using them?
For example, if you are adding a new patient, lets say a maltese cross Shih tzu (a shitese as I like to call them). When you start to type shih tzu you get the shihtzu breed but if there is no shih tzu cross maltese you could then just type it in and when you press return the application would say 'there is currently no breed lookup shihtzu X maltese. Would you like to create one?'. If you click OK it creates a new breed lookup which is associated with the dog species lookup as you have already selected that when entering the breed.
I can't tell you how many times I try to use a lookup that isn't there and think "damn I still haven't added that lookup. I must get around to it".
What do others think?
Matt Y.
on-the-fly creation of new
Hi Matt,
Sounds a good idea. I think I asked whether we could be allowed free typing into the breed field sometime back. Would still want a list to choose from to keep things quick .
For now I have 'designer originals' entered as small/med/large crossbreeds then I tack the actual Shitzu x Maltese on the end of the colour field.
Thinking of it in a different way. I wonder if choosing none could allow free typing into the breed field without the entry becoming recorded as a breed lookup. This would avoid a rapidly growing list of one off cross breeds appearing in the lookups.
Cheers Geoff
Breeds
Hey guys,
I think Geoffs point about rapidly growing list of cross breds is very true. Even more when there might be interesting spelling variations according to staff. When we changed over from netvet which had free entry, it took us some time to clean up our breeds!
Something like the choosing "None" and then free typing might work but from what I know of the way breeds are stored this might take some reconfiguration. The ability to call up breed in merged documents might be affected by this as well.
Not sure about this one...
Re: Breeds
Re: Breeds
I have had a play with the new lookup replacement feature and it works brilliantly and would make cleaning up lookups a breeze. It basically allows you to delete a lookup by merging it into another lookup. So duplicate lookups with different names (eg maltese x shihtzu and shihtzu x maltese) could be merged.
While the example I originally used was for breeds I was only using that as an example. I would like to have on-the-fly addition of lookups wherever they occur, although I guess macros are an exception to this rule. It would be really handle for adding appointment reasons for example.
Restricting the lookups to a predefined list of alternatives that can't be added to at the time will just lead to inaccurate data. As an example if there is no poodle cross and you are presented with a poodle cross do you make it a poodle (which is inaccurate) or as a mixed breed which probably wouldn't be very helpful if you were reviewing the history and didn't have the dog there.
IMHO the hassle of having to cleanup lookups from time to time is outweighed by the benefits of more accurate records.
Perhaps when a new entry is made not found in the lookups a dialogue could come up saying: 'do you want to add a new xxx lookup?' and if you say no it could be assigned a lookup (say 'other') with the user allowed to overwrite the lookup with text in the field instead of a lookup?
Matt Y.