Creating and editing records

The most important task of an editor is to create and edit records for digital collections, institutions, programmes or projects, products and services, or physical collections. Specific input forms are available for these different record types, but it all starts with the same operations.

Before you need to create a new record, you must decide in which folder you will place it. Either you first browse the database to a suitable location, or you create it in the default folder and then you move it to the right place.

1) Shortcuts to create a record

Your personal homepage includes links to quickly create records. To use them, do the following:

1. Go to your personal homepage by clicking on the Homepage link at the top left of the browsing window.
2. Click on a link in the My Shortcuts section of the page.

These links will get you right to the appropriate form. The record thus created will be stored in the default folder for the record type you chose. If you follow the above example, you will open a input form to create a new institution, and the record will be stored in the /mpf/records/institution folder. You may, of course, move the record afterwards.

2) Normal procedure to create a record

The normal procedure to create a record is to first browse to the destination folder and then to create a new document in the interface.

1) Use the browsing feature of the application in order to make the destination folder as the current folder.

2) Click on the Add document button in the documents section of the browsing window:

3) In the following form, choose the right data type:

Only the last five entries must be used, they correspond to the five record types or entities defined in the MICHAEL data model.

4) The form will reload to let you choose an input form for this record type:

For now, only a complete form is available for all the data types.

5) The form will reload to let you choose a template for this input form:

For now, only one default template is available for all forms.

6) Click on the Create the document button.

Once this process is completed, you will get the first screen of an input form for the selected data type. You can then proceed to enter data using the widgets explained later in this document.

3) Modifying an existing record

To modify an existing record, you need to browse to the location of that record, or to search for it. Once it is displayed in the documents part of the viewer, you can click in the first icon to the left of the screen, on the same line as the record you want to edit:

This will get you to the right input form for this record, and you will be able to modify the record.

4) Using the input forms

The input forms used in the MICHAEL production modules are all divided in many screens, in order to get lighter pages and to ease the data entry process.

There are two ways to go from one screen to the other. You can use the drop-down list of screens available at the top of every form screen to go directly to any of the screens:

You may also choose the previous or next buttons located at the bottom of each screen:

In both cases, the screen currently being displayed must be valid before going to another screen.

In order to save a record, you absolutely need to go to the last screen of the input form and to click on the save button at the bottom of the screen:

Currently, this is the only way to save your modifications! So please be sure you do this before leaving the form by any mean!

5) Widgets

Input forms contain widgets. Widgets let you type or select information that will be stored in the database. In this section, we present all the widget types you will find in the various input forms, with explanations on how to use them.

Simple text zone

A simple text zone lets you enter text on a single line. In general, the size of input is not limited, although it can be in some cases. The input size is never bound by the visible part of the widget; text can be longer than the part visible.

Some fields are repeatable, although they contain free text. In such cases, you can add an occurrence by clicking on the + sign close to the field label. You can remove an occurrence by clicking on the – sign on the left of the corresponding text zone. The following figures shows such a widget:

Text area

A text area is not only a larger zone for entering free text, it will also let you create paragraphs within the text. Paragraphs are delimited by a carriage return. You may separate paragraphs with more than one carriage returns to ease the reading and writing, but multiple carriage returns are considered as only one paragraph delimiter.

Text are are never limited, you can enter as many text as you want.

Lists

Lists are widget that let you select one or more values. They can take many forms.

A simple drop-down list is as shown below:

With these widgets, you can only select one value.

A multiline list looks like this:

In such a case, you can select more than one value using the standard Windows or Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts. For instance, under Windows, you add another value by holding the CTRL key while clicking on the new value. You can select many successive values by holding the SHIFT key instead.

Sometimes, multiline lists are not suitable since you can't see all the values selected, if the list is long. For such cases, you will use double lists, such as:

The left list contains all the values not selected; the right list contains the values currently selected. You can select a value by clicking on it in the left and then click on the > button in the middle. It will also work if you select more than one value on the left. The < button lets you remove a selected value; to do so, click on the value to remove on the right and then on the < button. It will appear again in the left list. The >> and << will let you add or remove all values. Please note that you can add or remove values also by double-clicking on them.

All the previous list widgets are for closed list. It means that you can only select a value from the list. Sometimes, you can also add some information not present in the list. To do so, you will use a double open list, such as:

The double list works as described before. To add values not in the reference list, use the text zone below and separate values with a semi-colon (;).

Calendar

To enter a precise, a calendar may be used, such as:

You can navigate the calendar and select the appropriate date.