Maintenance Clean Descriptions

Maintenance - Clean descriptive data

Descriptive data, which can be summary or sampling data, are stored in the database in several tables, that reference the corresponding descriptor rsp. categorical state and hold some additional data. Depending on the descriptor type - categorical, quantitative, text or sequence - different tables are used to represent the descriptive data. Although Diversity Descriptions does not allow to change the type of a descriptor if descriptive data are present, in some cases it cannot be assured that such an action is rejected. The resulting data are then meaningless and will not be displayed within Diversity Descriptions. To find, check and delete such kinds of corrupted descriptive data, select the Maintain descriptive data tab and choose the tab Clean descriptive data.

Select the Data type (“Summary data” or “Sampling data”), the Entity type (i.e. the type of descriptive data in database: “categorical”, “quantitative”, “text” or “sequence”) and the Project. Click on Check for invalid data and all invalid data will be listed (see image below).

You may select or deselect all entries of the result list for the database update by clicking the buttons Select all rsp. Select none. To delete the selected entries from the database click on the button. Instead of deleting the selecting entries you may click Close form and check list in database to return to the main program with the affected descriptions.

You may open a table editor for the selected entries by clicking the Open table editor button (see image below). Here you may check the corrupted data to decide if further measures are required.