Building Rucksacks outside Recorder

1 Introduction

A rucksack in Recorder is a concept used to hold frequently used items. It consists of a series of lists of Taxon names, Biotope classes, Locations, Names & Addresses and References. The files are generally created through the application interface but in some cases it may be easier for a technical user to build them manually. This tutorial explains the underlying concepts including potential problems with building them outside the application.

2 File format

The rucksack files are simple text files with a “.ruk” extension (rather than the normal “.txt” one). Simply create a txt file in notepad (or equivalent) and save the file using .ruk instead of .txt.

Normal> 

The .ruk file needs to have a minimum of the following content:

Note that Recorder expects all of these tags to be present in the .ruk file even if some are not being used. Otherwise when you load the rucksack in the viewer you will get this message:

Recorder expects a set of relevant keys to be specified within each of these tags (or simply the tags themselves). The keys are to be listed, one per row, between a single set of tags (see <PEOPLE> example below). The keys should be derived from the fields in the following tables (table.field):

• TAXON : TAXON_LIST_ITEM.TAXON_LIST_ITEM_KEY
• BIOTOPE: BIOTOPE.BIOTOPE_LIST_ITEM
• LOCATION: LOCATION.LOCATION_KEY
• PEOPLE: NAME.NAME_KEY
• REFERENCE: REFERENCE.SOURCE_KEY

If you are not sure how to  match the list of taxon names you have with the taxon_list_item_key (ie How to use the species dictionary in Recorder) see the tutorial 'Taxon name matching using the Species Dictionary'.

So, for example to add Steve Wilkinson and Stuart Ball to the list of people in the rucksack, you would just add the relevant key within the “people” tags as follows:

In addition, as of Recorder 6.13 an additional, optional, tag was added to allow the user to specify an alternative search code for a species (when entering data in a recording card. The information to support this is contained within a <TAXONSEARCHCODE> tag as shown in the following example:

This particular example equates the letter “f” to taxon list item key NBNSYS0000165261.

It should be noted that the rucksack viewer will automatically remove any invalid items (ie. Keys which do not exist in the relevant table). Other aspects of the functionality (e.g. a recording card derived from a rucksack) will not be so tolerant however, so it is advisable to open any rucksacks created outside Recorder through Tools -> Rucksack and save the file from here (File -> Save). This will automatically remove any invalid entries.

Note that currently, taxon items are listed in the rucksack in the order that they are added. This means that if you wish to view the rucksack and subsequent recording card in taxonomic order you should make sure that the Taxon_List_Item_Keys are listed in taxonomic order in the .ruk file.

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3 Known problems

RecorderApp.exe (Exception message: “Unable to complete file operation.  Please ensure that the rucksack has not been deleted.”)

Possible causes:

• More than one name in the rucksack has the same preferred name - within Recorder all species names are matched to a name that is currently considered the preferred name. As the taxonomy for a group changes, so the recognised preferred name may change. If more that one entry in the rucksack is matched to the same preferred name the above error will occur. This is a known bug.
• Duplicate items in the <TAXON> tag - if you manually create a rucksack (e.g. in a text editor) and accidentally create duplicate items in <TAXON> section of the rucksack it will fail to load and throw the error above. To correct carefully check for any duplication of keys within that section. This is a known bug.

Missing tags

The file must contain at least the set of minimum tags specified above. If any of these are missing the following error will occur:

“Unable to read the content of rucksack xxxx. This file is an invalid rucksack file or its contents have been corrupted.” (where xxxx is the name of the rucksack).

To correct, simply ensure that all the tags are present and are correctly spelt.

Invalid items

If invalid items are added to the rucksack (ie. Items that do not exist in the relevant dictionary) and the rucksack is subsequently used as the basis for a recording card (without first viewing the rucksack through Recorder) the following error will occur:

“One or more taxa could not be added to the recording card. This is either because several taxa share the same preferred name or because the checklist is not installed”

To rectify this, open the rucksack in Recorder (through Tools -> Rucksack) and save it (File -> Save). This should remove any invalid items.