In my database I originally had one Master Source for Court Order Books. I’m now wanting a different source for each State County (e.g., VA-Mecklenburg) so that I keep them separated visually. But I have 56 citations for the original. Is there a way to take those existing citations and connect them to my new Court Order sources for VA-Brunswick, VA-Lunenberg, and VA-Mecklenburg.
Paul Pennington
No.
It would have to be a manual process. It’s like you would create 56 brand new citations using your new Master Sources and then you would delete all 56 old citations. Well, deleting all 56 old citations would be trivial because all you would have to do would be to delete the old Master Source and it would delete the old citations at the same time. But there really isn’t a way to convert Master Sources in the manner you describe. You would have to create the new citations manually.
I certainly wouldn’t delete the old citations until you have all the new citations in place. The old citations are really the only reliable record you have of where the new citations should go.
Thank you. That’s going to be a pain with all of the details I have in those citations. Basically will require copy and past field by field. I’ve printed out a source list with all citations for this. So I guess I’ll have to use what I saved in Word and then work off of that.
I don’t understand how database programmers can’t figure out how to allow a change of link from one source to another, where the citation is preserved, but the source can be updated. Or a way to Merge from the old to the new with an option to only select some of the connected citations that get merged to the new source from the old. Wish I could get into the SQLLite backend. It’s a matter of changing links from Old Source to New Source.
But, thank you for the response.
There sort of is a way in RM to accomplish part of what you want with a Merge. But I couldn’t think of a way to make it work in your case. The problem with trying to do it with a merge is that you aren’t simply needing to replace one Source with another Source. Instead, you are needing to replace one Source with three other Sources. Maybe somebody else could think of an automated way to do it from the RM user interface, but I’m stumped.
Actually, 56 citations isn’t all that many as compared to the thousands of citations that users sometimes run into that need adjustments. If I were doing your project, I could do it with SQLite but it might almost be easier for me to do the the 56 citations by hand than to develop and test the SQLite query. I’m very cautious about updating my RM database with SQLite. If it were thousands of citations, I would definitely take the time to develop and test the SQLite query.
Jerry,
Thanks for the SQLite heads up. I made a test copy of my DB. Installed and connected SQLite Studio. Ran my test queries to identify the columns and SourceIDs (old and new ones) - data structure. I then tested my updates on my backup DB and they worked perfectly. I just finished running the updates on my current database and all of my Citations are now connected to the appropriate new Sources. I don’t use SQL much these days, but that was a handy automation that didn’t take too long to setup and manage.
Paul