Chordata has been built to handle entity attributes that have strict choices, limitless possibilities, or anything in between. Some Work or Product attributes, like Humans, Instruments, or Languages are “lookup” fields requiring a user to select options from system validated lists. Other attributes, like Text Source, Table of Contents, or Commission Notice allow for unvalidated text entry. The goal of this design is to, wherever possible, remove as much doubt from the process of data entry as possible and provide our many internal systems with clean, standardized data.
As of now, data validation is a work in progress. A number of fields that will be validated after future development are still simple text fields that will not discriminate data entered based on format or style. Chordata is, however, equipped with a “flagging” system to assist in catching errors and cleaning our data until we are able to put more elegant systems in place.
Error Flags
If data points are missing, incorrect, or not properly formatted, users can “report an error” by clicking the appropriate button above the entity “save” and “trash” buttons.
After selecting the relevant field and typing in either the expected value or a note describing the problem, clicking “Confirm” will log the error in the system and the affected field will be marked by a yellow error flag in the entry. These error flags will also be automatically logged by the system if improperly formatted data is imported by the CSV importer.
Clicking one of these flags will open a pop up that displays the error that occurred, the name of the field that was affected, the date the error was logged, the user who logged the error, and either the user entered note about the data or the data that failed to import.
Once the data problem has been resolved in the entry, clicking “Resolve this error” in the error pop up and confirming by clicking the green checkmark will remove the error from the system.