Re: review file of all patron records

[Elizabeth Thomsen <et at noblenet dot org>]

Yes, it's very handy to be able to do a review file without specifying any 
search conditions.  It doesn't actually add functionality, since we were 
always able to use some always-true search condition, but it does 
streamline the process a bit.

Aline is using this to get a review file of all records of a certain type,
and also using this to merge two review files together.  The latter is
very handy, especially now that we can dedupe review files.

The other place that this is handy is when you have a review file of items 
and you need to use that as the range for a file of patrons, or you want 
to make a file of bibs off a file of items, etc.  This became much easier 
with Silver, because of the same two things, search with no conditions, 
and deduping.  Here's an example of that:
http://www.noblenet.org/swapshop/lists/bibfromitems.html

These will all be included in my Create Lists session at the IUG meeting 
next week.  Hope to see a lot of you there!

Elizabeth 

 On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Aline Soules wrote:

> Here I am, following up on my own call!  I contacted Innovative, as 
> mentioned in my original messasge, and received the following response, 
> which I thought might be helpful to the group:
> 
> 
> Simply specify the range of the entire patron database and do not input 
> any search criteria.  When you click search, if you have not entered any 
> search criteria, the system will prompt : "No search criteria have been 
> specified. Retrieve all records in range?". Answer yes to retrieve all 
> records.
> 
> Unfortunately, this is new development for Silver that was not fully 
> documented.  It will be in a forthcoming version of the user manual.  
> You may also use this feature when appending records.  For example, you 
> might want to append all the records in a specific range of records to 
> an existing file.
> 
> 


-- 
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers MA 01923
et at noblenet dot org