Note: this blog post was originally posted on lambtracker.com and has been moved here for preservation. Some information may be outdated.
Just finished a major change to the database structure. We’ve always had a few static concepts in the system. Alerts are things that you want to check next time you work on the sheep. Notes are things that stay with the sheep record for life, but don’t really fit into any other table. Evaluations are ranking, scoring, and measuring tests for the sheep.
What became obvious during our recent testing is that Udder Status (choosing from none, small, medium, or large) is really an evaluation at a given time for a sheep. It’s not really a note as much as a user-defined evaluation. I’ve already created user evaluations for Estrus and Pregnancy Status, so I had a good structure to start with. I’ve added Udder Status to the user-defined evaluations now. I also finished fixing the EvaluateSheep module to handle dynamic creation of multiple user-defined traits with custom results. Our next task was to update the database and fix current historical records to reflect the new structure.
I suspect that each flock owner will have a slightly different take on what should be a note or alert, but that’s why the system is designed to support multiple options. For now, this new structure seems to make the most sense to me.