[Babase] Stop times in Actor_actees
Karl O. Pinc
kop at meme.com
Tue Jun 29 20:32:40 EDT 2010
On 06/29/2010 05:23:46 PM, Lacey Maryott Roerish wrote:
> have
> finished the Psion and adlib uploads that I normally do, with the
> exception
> of one psion file which I need to re-enter by hand as the psion
> faultered
> when converting the file. However, I have now gotten to the point of
> extracting the adlibs from Courtney's psion data. I have them all
> extracted
> and now have files that are ready to upload. My question is, these
> are all
> data that have time stamps associated with them, which I Would hate
> to
> lose
> since we already have them attached to the data.
Right. Me too.
> However, they ALL
> have only
> start times and no stop times, as there are no Consorts, only M,E,G,A
> (haha
> mega..). So, if I upload directly into actor_actees without a stop
> time,
> will it fill in the stop time with the start time as it does with
> regular
> psion files?
No. The psionload program puts the given time into both the start
and stop columns but the view just does exactly what you tell it to.
Both the Start and Stop columns allow NULLs so actor_actees does too.
>
> Looking at the old foxpro data (aka data that was uploaded before
> Babase
> 2.0) it looks like it used to be the case that the times would just
> match,
> but in the newer data, starting in 06B with the first Babase 2.0
> upload
> (where I have been leaving stop blank in excel files for handwritten
> data
> for M and E) stop is just blank.
> Am I doing something wrong? Is this ok?
I don't know. I would expect that start and stop times would
be NULL only for where you've consortships where you don't
know the start or stop time, but that's just a guess. It's
something I'd expect to be documented in the data management
protocols as to when a NULL should be used.
Knocking around the back of my brain is the notion that
M and E are "point" events and so should never have a stop
time whereas other activity always should. But that probably
has nothing to do with reality. Likely it dates back to
when we first created the database and has not a lot to do
with the way data existed at that time, or later. We certainly
never made such a rule for the db to enforce.
This may be a matter for a phone meeting.
> The files I will be uploading have the following columns:
> date, actor, actee, act, start
>
> Should I add a stop column and just leave it blank?
My approach would be to add and stop column and copy (by
cell reference) the start column into it so they're always
the same. But I'd also want to at least consult with Susan.
>
> The documentation says:
>
> Stop:
> The time the interaction stopped or, in the case of all-occurrences
> data,
> the time the interaction was recorded in the field.
>
> At any rate, I'm not sure it makes a difference if stop is Null or
> matches
> start.. I just wanted to know what to expect, and couldn't discern
> that from
> the documentation.
I've updated the documentation on the psionload program so that it
says that the ad-lib times are recorded in both the start and stop
columns. I don't really want to have the technical documentation
say exactly when a NULL should be in the start or stop column
because I feel like that's a matter of how the database is used.
Decisions about what the data is supposed to look like should
be in the data manual unless we've a rule in the database that
enforces a particular usage.
Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
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