The AMPR Map Collection Manager User’s Guide

Modifying a Collection’s Fields & Specifying the Image Directory

The following dialog box lets you make changes to the definition of the fields in your collection, as well as to specify the Image Directory.

This dialog box will appear when:

· You are defining a new collection and you click the “Modify Fields / Define Image Directory” button from the initial collection-setup dialog.
or

· You pick Modify Fields or Image Directory from either the Edit menu of the collection window or from the Collection menu on the main AMPR window. (Modifying the fields or image directory for a collection requires that the collection window be closed. If the collection window is open when you pick Modify Fields or Image Directory, the program, after prompting you for confirmation, will close the collection window before displaying the Modify Fields dialog.)

Except for the “Specify Image Directory” section at the lower left, this dialog is entirely about the fields of your collection:

• How many, and which, fields are included.
• What the fields are named.
• What type of data is stored in each field.

On the left are the choices for the 15 “built-in” fields; on the right are the choices for the “user-defined” fields.

There are eight field types:

• Short text – Text data that usually consists of a single word or a short phrase.
• One-line text – Text that is longer than a short text, but will usually fit on a single line.
• Multi-line text – Long text data that may span multiple lines.
• Currency.
• Dimension.
• Number.
• Date.
• Image link – Text that identifies the location of an image (either a file or a web-address URL).

Every field must be assigned to one of these types. The 15 built-in fields have pre-defined types, and these types cannot be changed. For any user field that you define, you will be asked to choose the type that best fits the kind of data it will hold. Image link fields are specifically intended to identify viewable images; the other seven data types function more as hints than as strict rules. (Number and Date types provide hints about sorting; Short Texts can have picklists associated with them; the One-line vs. Multi-line Text types provide hints about whether to use single-line or multi-line text-entry/text-edit boxes). In fact, any field can contain any kind of value and entered text has no length limit.

When displayed in the List view of the collection viewer window, columns that contain data for a field whose type is Number, Currency or Dimension will be shown right-justified; all other data types are shown left-justified.

For the built-in fields:

• If there is a built-in field that you don’t want to use, you can hide it. To hide a built-in field, check the corresponding “Hide” box. (The first three built-in fields cannot be hidden, since they are considered to be integral to some of the functions of the MCM. There is no requirement that you actually enter data into any of these three fields, but they cannot be hidden.) A hidden field will never be shown in the display or printing of a collection, nor in any data-entry or data-editing screens. Hiding a built-in field is an effective way of simply eliminating the field when it doesn’t correspond to a kind of information that you want to keep about your collection.
• To rename a built-in field, click on the corresponding “Rename” button and type in the new name for the field in the subsequent dialog box.

Notes on built-in fields:

• The “ID #” field is intended for the unique collection number you assign to each map in your collection. Not every collector assigns numbers to the objects in their collection, and the MCM does not require you to fill in data for the “ID #” field. However, since certain features of the MCM take advantage of unique “ID #” values, it is generally a good idea have them. Many collectors assign collection numbers numerically. However, the “ID #” field is defined as a short text, and you can assign non-numeric values.
• The “Image link” field is used to hold the filenames of digital images of your maps. When this field is shown in the Item Details display of a map record, it will display either as a thumbnail image or as a textual filename. (Whether a thumbnail image is displayed depends upon whether the image file is accessible on the local computer). In either case, thumbnail image or text, this functions as a link, so that clicking on it will bring up a window in which the image is displayed. This functions similarly to “Reference Image” links in the main AMPR program, though local-file images of maps in your own collection will be displayed in a special program window, rather than in a web browser window. For your collection, MCM generates the actual location of an image file by concatenating the directory specified as the “Image Directory” with the value in the “Image link” field. The “Image link” field functions together with the Image Directory, for which see the description below. Note: You can specify more than one image for a record. This can be done either by including multiple image links (separated by semicolons) in the “Image link” field, or by adding additional user-defined fields whose type is image link.
• Field names like “Condition,” “Information” and “Source” are intended to be generally suggestive titles for kinds of data about your maps that you might want to keep track of. Feel free to modify these general suggestions by renaming fields, or adding user-defined fields to augment or replace built-in fields, in order to customize your collection to exactly match the kind of information that you want to keep.

User-defined Fields

User-defined fields are optional – you can create them if you want to have fields other than those that are built-in. You can create as many user-defined fields as you want; there is no limit.

To create a user-defined field, click on the “Add a New Field” button. This will bring up the following dialog box:

Enter a name for the new field and choose a field type; then click OK.

If you specify a type of “image link”, then this field will function exactly the same as the Image Link field described earlier on this page.

If you later want to make changes to an existing user-defined field, select it from the list on the right and click “Modify”. The same dialog box as shown above will appear, but it will be filled in for the current name and type of the field. Make any desired modifications and click OK.

To delete an existing user-defined field, select it from the list on the right and click “Delete.”

The Image Directory (for collections with digital images)

If you have digital images of maps in your collection, and they are mostly located in a single directory on your computer, specify that directory as the “Image Directory.” Click on the “Specify Image Directory” button and the following dialog box will appear:

Notes on the Image Directory:

• The Image Directory is only a convenience, allowing you to specify less information (just the filename, rather than the full pathname of the file) when you provide data for the “Image link” field (or for any user-defined image link fields). If you specify an Image Directory, you can still provide full pathnames for any images that don’t reside in the Image Directory. Therefore you can use the shortened image link names for image files that reside in the Image Directory and full pathnames for files that reside elsewhere.
• As described in the text note in the dialog box, the Image Directory does not have to be a directory on the local computer. It can also be the path to a directory somewhere on the World Wide Web. In this case the path must begin with http://.
• If you specify a directory on your computer as the Image Directory, then normally you will specify a full pathname (including a drive letter – e.g. C:\Collections\MapCollection\Images). This is what you will get if you use the Browse button to identify the Image Directory. However, there are two alternative ways of specifying the Image Directory, which can be useful if you plan to copy or move your collection (and its associated images) to another computer:

Ø You can specify a pathname that is full, except without any drive letter (e.g. \Collections\MapCollection\Images). In this case, the program will look for the image directory on the same drive as the collection file itself. This approach is useful if you write your collection file and associated images to a CD-ROM or DVD that you want to be able to use on a different computer. On the destination computer, the CD-ROM or DVD drive may have a different letter than the drive where your collection was on your original computer. By leaving the drive letter off of the Image Directory path specification, you can let the program figure out the appropriate drive letter itself. Note that if you use this approach, the specified pathname must begin with a slash character, indicating a full directory path on the drive used.

Ø You can specify a relative pathname, relative to the directory that contains the collection file. This is useful if you create the folder for the Image Directory in the same place as the collection file itself. For example, if your collection file is C:\Collections\MapCollection\MyMaps.xml and you have put your images in a sub-directory (let’s say it is named Images) in the same folder with the collection file (i.e. the full pathname to the Image Directory is C:\Collections\MapCollection\Images), then you can specify just Images as the Image Directory, and the program will find this, relative to the directory (C:\Collections\MapCollection) that contains the collection file. In this case, you can move the collection file and its associated Image Directory together, to another location or to another machine, and the program will still successfully locate your images, without your having to edit the Image Directory location.

• You can control some of the characteristics of image display (e.g. size of thumbnails, initial size for full image windows). See the discussion of Image Preferences for more information.

When you have finished modifying fields and specifying the Image Directory, click OK to apply your changes. If you are modifying fields as part of the initial setup for a new collection, you will be returned to the initial dialog used to define a new collection. Click OK in that dialog to complete the setup for your collection. Return to Defining a New Collection for full details.

If you already have collection data in a computer readable form, read about Importing Data into your Collection. If you don’t have data to import, you can begin by adding data records to your collection through the data-entry screens of the MCM. To find out how to do this, read about Adding Data to your Collection.

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