Thanks for the interest Mark. I can try!
We are looking at tracking activities that occur in a training program where there is also heirarchy. That is: staff / senior trainee / junior trainee. Sometimes staff trains two juniors. Sometimes a senior trains a junior with the help of the staff. Sometimes a senior does the activity with the help of the junior and no staff. And other combinations. Thus, you might have records:
| Primary actor |
Secondary Actor |
Tertiary Actor |
Grade |
Activity details (date, label, etc. multiple col) |
| senior |
staff |
junior |
2 |
activty 1 |
| staff |
senior |
|
1 |
activity 2 |
| senior |
junior |
staff |
4 |
activity 3 |
| junior |
senior |
staff |
3 |
activty 4 |
Each person may have a slightly different role in the activity even when the Actor position is the same. Thus activity 1 the senior needed more help but in activity 3 the senior needed very little help and in activity 4 they were teaching while in activity 2 they were observing the staff. This data entry model makes a lot of sense when entering because that is how the activity proceeds and how it is already commonly recorded. IE, entering the data in the same way I want the eventual report is problematic because the people just don't think that way. My automations solved that problem to get a report of the trainees (not the activities). I end up wanting a list of activities for each person. So the list above needs to be reported like this:
| activity |
person |
job |
category in words |
grade (may or may not be same as reported grade) |
| activity 1 |
senior |
primary |
needs lots of help |
2 |
| activity 2 |
senior |
secondary |
observing |
1 |
| activity 3 |
senior |
primary |
needed very little help |
4 |
| activity 4 |
senior |
secondary |
taught the junior |
4 |
| activity 1 |
staff |
secondary |
teacher |
6 |
| activty 2 |
staff |
primary |
teacher |
6 |
| activity 3 |
staff |
secondary |
teacher |
6 |
| activity 4 |
staff |
tertiary |
teacher |
6 |
| activity 1 |
junior |
tertiary |
observing |
1 |
| activity 3 |
junior |
secondary |
observing |
1 |
| activity 4 |
junior |
primary |
needed very little help |
3 |
The automations I have set up do this nicely based on rules which may or may not be obvious above, but the problem became today that I had it set up inappropriately and it passed the blanks for tertiary for activity 2. And it did it over and over and over (500+ records in my test database). So, that was a problem. What I really wanted was to fire the automation over and just get it reset. Probably one thing I could do is set up a time-based triggers and run an overnight automation basically run the same automations but getting it right could be tiresome if I mess it up a couple times and have to wait until every night to let it run to see if I set it up correctly. In the long-term, I'm thinking about what will happen if the reporting requirements change and then I've got a very useful set of database records with all the correct information but all the wrong answers, so to speak.
So, 2 questions remain, then. Is there a better way to get the desired result? Second, if not, is there a better way to get the automations to fire when I want them to particularly if I'm testing or else if the reporting requirements change, which they might.
Thanks
Dave
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Dave Halter
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