dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[johansa@xxxxxxxxxx]

> 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).

Acutally, I thought it was only 20 in DHIS 1.4? What happens at import
then? btw, the maximum length is very useful, not only for the technical
reasons already mentioned, but also for making nice reports (without just
cutting away the often important last part of a DE name). That's the main
reason from a users perspective


> 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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