Automatic Society ID, Tattoo generation

Using automatic tag generation is a useful feature to save time in HerdMASTER, allowing you the ability to tell HerdMASTER what to generate in which field for appropriate submission when dealing with societies. This tip sheet goes through how to setup the auto-tag formats and provides an example using society ID.

Sometimes particular Breed Societies will use animal fields in different ways. For example the some societies currently generates the society ID for their users based on a tag you submit through the tattoo field of your registrations. Others allow you to generate your own society IDs and submit them with your registrations in the Society ID field. Due to these differences, depending on which breed you are dealing with at the time, the setup of the Auto Tag generation may differ slightly however the instructions will be almost the same. We do try to have Auto-tags setup already depending on the breed you use, but sometimes your animal tags don’t fit a particular format (if you have a slash for example in the animal tag)

Here are the ID characters and what information they get:

So in the previous part we used the example of HHHAZZZ, if our animal’s tag is K030, Sex is Male and our HerdID is SAL then the resulting ID would be SALK30. If our ID was generating as HHHANNNNS the resulting ID would be SALK0030M

Go to Setup | Site Options -> Program Defaults

The area we want is circled on the image below. Sometimes particular breeds will use Tattoo instead of Society ID and also have an area for Default ID, so this may appear slightly differently on your screen. This field is not an Auto Generating field, as you set your tags on each animal manually, this field is used to determine HOW you are writing your animal tags so that when other ID’s are generated it gets the correct information. The default is the standard we have found most clients using, “ANNN”, so Year letter then zero padded numbers to three digits.

One of the most important in making life easy, most societies allow for auto-generation of Society IDs, as long as it is in the correct format for your society and your animal tag is set correctly then HerdMASTER will automatically create the society ID for an animal when you add it manually.

Tattoo can be used as an addition on animal’s names in reports, so if an animal has a suffix of Madonna and a Tattoo of K31 then the name of the animal in some reports will read as “Madonna K31”.

Hit the customise link underneath the Society ID and we can take a look at the way that the auto-generation works.

So start by hitting the Add button on the far right menu and type in a unique name for the new format. I’m calling mine test.

Next I hit the clear button enough times to remove any pre-existing formatting characters.

Now let’s assume my society allows for auto-generation of society IDs and I need to use the first 3 characters of my breeder ID, then a 2 digit year number, the sex and finally a 4 digit numerical animal tag for the animal.

On this side is the area where you can reselect what Tag is going to be affected and below that is the area for all the different setups you have made.

This section is where we put in the actual settings for the auto-generation. You can add and clear individual characters from the generated tag.

On this panel we can add a new format which we recommend rather than overwriting the default one This area shows the preview of what will be generated if input the information in the boxes such as animal tag. By using the Add Character drop-down box I can select the characters that can represent these fields. The description of each character are to the right, if the column is not wide enough to display all the information you need then you may click on the line in the header between the scrollbar and the description title and move it to the right to widen the field (or double click on it)

So we are starting with the 3 characters of my breeder identity – so in the list we see H = Breeder Number and J = Breeder number (stripped), the stripping means any blanks (or 0s if it is a number for our breeder ident) at the start will be stripped out, as we do not need to do this, we select H.

Hit the add button next to the drop down 3 times. This will mean that the first three characters of our breeder ident will be the first part of our new auto-generated Society ID.

Now we need 2 digits for the year of birth for our animal, in the drop-down list you can see A = Letter (year) but we don’t need that. What we need is Y which is Birth Year. So we add two Ys to our code.

As we can see our Format preview area is changing as we add the characters.

I have setup the details of the previewed animals in the area and at the bottom we see what the output will be so far.

My breeder ident. Is SALTBUSH, so it has grabbed SAL and the year the calf was born is 2015, so it has grabbed the LAST two digits of the date. Giving us SAL15 as our current output.

Now we need to add the sex and the animal tag to the output. So I select and add an S character to give sex code of F or M.

Now in the next part we need a 4 digit NUMERICAL tag, my tag as seen above is L215, so we add four Ns. This gets 4 digits from the animal tag (appending 0 in front if there are not enough numbers in the tag) and ignores any letters.

As we can see our format is now HHHYYSNNNN which gives the preview of SAL15F0215 which matches what we need for our society.

Lastly hit the Set Default button on the far right and this will mean any society IDs now generated will automatically use this format to create them.

If you are unsure of what your society requires then please call them to ascertain what they need when registering new calves.

Brahman currently use the tattoo field for registration, in your site options Tattoo will be displayed rather than society ID.

We have set up HerdMASTER to have default tag generation pre-set for particular societies, but they may change these at any time.

If you have set up your tag generation but have animals that have either incorrect or do not have the society ids etc. then you can use the rules to re-calculate the tags. I will be using the Society ID tag generation format I set up in the previous section. Make sure you have the format you wish to use setup as the selected format in your site options.

1. Hit Utilities -> Recalculate -> Animal IDs

2. Use the window shown below to select which animals to perform this on. I have selected my K calves.

3. Hit the OK button once you have moved the selected animals into the right column.

4. Select which ID to regenerate from the window below

5. I select the Tattoo as that is what I wish to regenerate.

Open

6. Hit the OK button.

7. A warning will display asking if you wish to overwrite any ID information that is already entered on the animals, in my case I do, but if you were just generating NEW IDs that animals did not yet have then hit the NO button.

8. A progress bar will appear as it processes the new IDs.

9. Check a couple of the animal details you processed and see that they are accurate to what you need. In this case my animal breeder is SALTBUSH, the animal was born in 2013, is female and has the numerical tag of 0670. Giving me a Society ID of SAL13F0670 which is what I set up in the previous section.