dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>]

I will throw my two (probably worthless) cents in here. [?]

For the use case you describe Knut (surveys), it is incumbent upon the user
to create a unique AND short name, usually to pull into something like SAS,
SPSS, R or other statistical package (or possibly GIS) that can only deal
short names. Most survey packages (CSPRO, LimeSurvey, etc) require some sort
of unique and short name as a code for each question. So if the survey has
been properly implemented from the get-go, there should not be an issue
here. I would say that this import process should simply be *well documented
*, and that the current data model should not be messed with. It works well
for things like exporting to DBF (compatible with GIS) and releasing this
restriction could really create a lot of problems, potentially also with
importing data from DHIS 1.4 (although I have no idea what the actual
maximum length there is, but I assume it is 25 as well).


I say leave it as is. If people need this functionality, let them change the
DB at their own peril.

Regards,
Jason



On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>> 2009/4/17 Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> > On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>  We have
>> >> 'description' which holds an arbitrary amount of text.  So I would opt
>> >> to import the full question in here and do some sort of fat truncation
>> >> trick for the short names which are too long. How many of them go
>> >>
>> >> over the limit?
>> >
>> > 2341
>>
>> Thats a lot more than you want to do by hand!  Dunno.  Will think some
>> more.
>>
>
> For now, I will make do with truncated names + id. We just have to add the
> full names to the report tables (which currently rely only on short names -
> easy enough to do).
>
> But it is an interesting question whether it is possible to generate
> meaningful names (both full and short) from long survey questions (a handful
> are over 150 characters), whereas the full question can go into the
> description field or similar.
>
> Knut
>
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