Filters in HerdMASTER
All of the data entry screens support restricting the list of animals available to make whatever data entry you are doing more manageable.
A worksheet is used to keep a list of animals you want to work with (see Worksheets in HerdMASTER).
A filter is used with or without a worksheet to dynamically filter animals available based on a search.
To make a new animal filter, to “Setup->Filtering->Animal Filter”
If you want to make a new filter, hit the “Add Filter” button on the right hand side.
Enter a filter name. Make it something meaningful to aid in remembering what it does. “Test Filter” is OK for this exercise:
The filters are made by selecting an attribute (i.e. “Animal Tag”, “Birth Year” etc), selecting what kind of match you want (“Equal”, “NotEqual” or a mathematical expression available in the list) and some kind of value.
Here I want a filter that gives me quick access to all animals born in 2005. Test the filter with the “Test Filter” button and animals meeting the filter criteria will be shown in the results pane:
You can continue adding “Filter Lines” to further restrict the results. Here we add a line to the filter and introduce further criteria. If you add a line and don’t want it, use the “Remove Line” button (which will always remove the last line in the conditions).
The added line has a little blue AND next to it. The AND means that the first line AND the second line will be used to filter the animals. If you click on AND you can change it to OR which means either line will satisfy the filter criteria. Here we add an OR clause to also include animals from 2006:
Once you are happy with your filter, hit the “Close” button on the right hand side and it will be ready to use on the data entry forms. You can also Delete your filter if you don’t want it any more. Adding or Deleting the filter does not affect the animal data.
Once we have created our filter, we can use it the data entry forms. Here we will use the Weights data entry form to demonstrate how to use a filter.
in the “Active Filter” dropdown, there is a blank line and two filters, “ON INV” and “Test Filter”. If you select the blank line, no filter will be used. If you select either of the other two, that filter will be applied. Select “Test Filter”.
Once we select “Test Filter” it will restrict the list of animals to those that satisfy the filter criteria.
You can use a combination of Worksheet and Filter to give you a tight selection of animals to add to this data entry form. pressing the right arrow will move a selected animal from the list to the weights entry form.