Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch is joined by Senior Support Specialist, Seth Warren, and Technical Writer, Julia Shefcheck to discuss using the Code Conversion utility to update RecTrac System Codes. The group highlights how to access the program, what codes can be converted, and when a code conversion may be appropriate for your business needs.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:40
All right, capt at Cat Dance is complete well he's still going, he might still be going for a little bit. Oh, knocking my headphones off. All right. Well, welcome to RecChat, everybody. We're going to be talking about code conversion today. Assuming that I get my hands back in a moment here, but I did want to take a moment and say that shock and barrel have made it through their first year successfully as of last are Monday, Monday was Halloween, their birthday.
Julia Shefcheck 1:12
Happy birthday!
Zach Malloch 1:16
All right, as attractive as cats are. And as nice as they are. We still should probably talk about code conversion, at least a little bit here. So let's just get RecTrac. Ready to go. All right, buddy. And oh, well, I'll go ahead and mention the initial announcements. Um, we do have that q&a Button down at the bottom. So if you have any questions, you can use that and Seth and Julia will be monitoring and interjecting whenever it makes sense to do so. And if you have any just general comments, you can of course, use the chat area. And I think that I set that so everybody can talk to everybody if you want to. And now I have everything ready to go. And we'll share this and I think you should can see RecTrac Now, yes. Awesome. Excellent. Well, let's get started.
So code conversion, as I mentioned, in the invite email is almost always the first utility, at least I personally have shown people in RecTrac. Most of the time you are getting into the first area of the system, you know, maybe you've already done GL codes, but then you're starting in facilities, or you're starting with activities. And it's usually within the first three or four minutes of turning it over to everybody just to start inputting information. And somebody says, Oh, I messed up my facility code, or a really common thing that I realized I wasn't training all that well, was talking about facility class management. And one of the most common things that can happen is when we get into facility class management, is we start getting really, really specific as far as what the thing is. So rather than just a pool that represents all of our pools, we might start putting in like, you know, spring Vail West pool in Springville East pool. And we don't need that level of specificity here at the class level. So, you know, I would want to come down here and make sure that everything is very generic, maybe like I've got activity room here, I've got a fitness room, I've got locker rooms, classrooms, I've got training rooms, weight rooms, just rooms, lots of different types of rooms. So maybe I want to go through and I want to adjust something. Now, of course, I could make a new class. And then I could go into I can go to facilities. But if I then go to one of my facilities and try to edit the class, well, we'll see that it's kind of fixed in place, I can't adjust this part of the record, everything up here is what makes this a completely unique, unique value in the system. And so we need to be able to make sure that that's kind of protected, which is why it's isolated why we can't change it. So whenever we have something that we can't change, and even if we're just going right to facility class management, if I edit this, maybe I just misspelled it, maybe I didn't want to abbreviate it AC T RM, maybe I wanted to spell it out. But it's grayed out because it's locked in place as soon as you create that record and save it the first time. So that's when we get to a utility that lets us do that conversion. So if I just go to code conversion, and leave everything at single record right now, but under this drop down, I have all the different areas of the system that I can process a conversion on. So if I go down to facility, well, I've got facility, I've got facility location. I don't see class here, but if I keep going, then I will see system codes and I believe that system codes include facility classes, or its facility category. Let's see. Did I miss it? Was it actually up here?
facility facility location, maybe would actually just be doing the facility in that case, although maybe Seth, can you jump in there and just see if maybe we have it under anything else. Like, as I went into Service Item, this is actually one of the newer enhancements to the new when I say new are relatively newer, within the past couple of years here. So that's starting with this Service Item segment actually wanted to get to system code. So we have all the different system code types, just see if we typing class, nope. So the category condition, feature time block and Type. So maybe we actually, in the process of Claire, cleaning this up and giving it new features, maybe we don't have the ability to convert a facility class at the might
Seth Warren 5:55
Hey Zach, I don't think we can and John chatted in here and was mentioning that facility class has a separate code, you can't do the code conversion on the class. But you can change the facility to have a new class through the code conversion, if you just choose the the conversion or the code Type as facility, then you have an option to select a new class here, but I don't believe we have a code conversion option for class,
Zach Malloch 6:22
we will certainly put that in as an enhancement request, because I can't really think of a reason that we wouldn't be able to just convert the class. But what we're talking of what John typed in is absolutely correct is if I choose this, like let's say I have this activity room, and I already made my new class, which was activity r o m, let's say had been, I would just adjust this. And make sure that everything else is exactly the same for those other three pieces. Now, of course, this doesn't actually exist. So it's going to give me an error message. But if I had processed it would go through every, every, every area in the system where this value exists, and replace it with this combination of three values. So really, we're only changing this piece. So it's going to go and find the replays every time this code exists as all of these three pieces representing just that single facility, then it will replace that in history in all of the transactions that people have done. If you go to purchase history, it won't recreate receipts or anything. But everywhere the old record existed, now the new record will exist. Maybe a better example, would just be activity. This is certainly one we use more often. Because once people get the hang of active our facilities and facility classes, it's a little bit more straightforward. But let's say there's two main reasons that we would go in and we'd change an activity code. So I'm making something brand new. And I know that we're doing a six digit format, and I just go really quickly. And I accidentally do an eight digit format. And I go ahead and fill in everything else all the way. And maybe I've already set fees, rules, questions, maybe I've already got sections in here, because I can always delete this record, and just create a new one. But if I've already done a lot of the setup, then maybe I don't want to now maybe I could clone it, and then make those changes to it. But I can also do just the code conversion.
So coming back to code conversion, single record for an activity, bring up my Pick list. And what did I start that there it is started with the ones. So that is, you know, it's two digits longer than most of my other conventions. So I just take that and I would adjust it and maybe it's supposed to just be 102 Something like that. And then when I hit process, it will go through everywhere the old exists, that old example existed and replace it with the new detail, it sends it to the server to the app server to process in the background. But now if I go to activity management, if I scroll down, there's that activity, if I refresh, we can see now it has been converted and as with all of the purchase history all with all the transaction history and everything would also be converted with that. So it's It is that easy to kind of do just this one to one conversion. So facility location, we had it listed as Mills Perk and we want to make it Mills Park, we can very easily do that. And just kind of go through all of the different areas in the system that we have access to. Now system code was kind of a special one. Now if I just go to system code management, we can see that system codes have all of these other types built into them. Or so whenever you're creating a system code it is a system code record but then you will have to define what Type of a system code record it is. So if I was creating something brand new here, the first thing I would have to choose is going through this have a long list of all of these different categories, and figure out exactly which one is the right one to set up. So that's why we have this extra drop down when we choose. Go back to my code conversion, we choose system code. And the first thing we have to do is what record Type are we picking from. So like if I chose activity category, and for a long time, we didn't have the ability of doing this through code conversion, you would have to clone the activity category, delete it, and then do a bulk change to replace the activity category where it needed to be.
So I've got activity category defined, all of these values are my activity category values, if I switch this to, let's just go to general category, which I believe is household category, we can see it is now a different list. So there's my resident and non resident, affiliate, faculty, staff, and etc. And then anything that I come in here to adjust, there's facility category, and I've only got a small pavilion as a category there. But we choose the value we put in whatever the new thing is, and we're kind of good to go. Now there is this other option here of merging records. So let's say that we are converting something from one value into the value of something else that already exists. So when I was doing the activity conversion, and I chose this number, and I switched to this one. Now you notice there's not actually the merge record option here, because it's kind of a one to one thing. But when we do get to, let's go back to facility. So let's say that we actually already went through and we created the facility with the right class, but this old one with the wrong class still exists. So if I have this merge records Toggle turned on, it's going to start from here. And it's going to end with the saying AC t r o o m, and then underscore ASRC, underscore 44 or 440. A. But if that value already existed in the system, is it going to stop until you that there's an error? Or is it going to combine them to say there were two records, but now we're combining it and reducing it down to one record, which is probably what it should have been in the first case anyway. So that's just a little piece here that you'll see in some areas. Now, this is kind of where code conversion really grows up, and becomes super useful beyond implementation. So in implementation, it's really, really useful because kind of as you go, you realize you're creating your conventions, and maybe you kind of diverged from it, and you're just fixing things up. But let's say that after you've been using RecTrac, for a while, you realize that maybe an entirely new convention would benefit you. So maybe there was a process where we were starting out with things, then method A and after using RecTrac, we just realized we wish that we had done it as method B. So if I Click on this little info icon, so we'd see the multiple codes all at once using an import file that lists the codes you wish to convert, for example, all of your activity sections. So we are going to have to start with an import file in this case. And let's see, and thought that we would have.
Second, my apologies for this little bit of a little bit of a wrinkle, because I thought that the file formats would just be right there. Guidance for creating the input file, there we go can be found right here. So import file, Type, and delimiter. So we're going to choose what we're going to be doing. Import File is based on the file structure of a single record of a code Type you wish to convert. They contain two fields. However, some code types contain multiple fields, the code Type you're converting has to then your import file have two columns. Yeah, so you're basically it's this is basically saying that the existing value is going to be on the left hand side, and then the new value that you want to use is going to be in the right hand column. So if you're saving this as a CSV, you could actually just write this completely from scratch. And let's just say that I wanted to say like activity number 11002233 is going to comma turn into activity 102233. And then I could just do a carriage return and I can do all of the different pieces that I wanted to together with that. So if I come back over here, and I say it's multiple record, and it's an activity, and I'm going to find the file, save it anywhere on my computer and then import it and it will then do that conversion for me multiple records at a time rather than one by one. I think that though, when we first initially did this, it was for GL codes because somebody wanted to Take all of their old records, and they're going into a new financial system, and there was going to be a one to one conversion between them. But to transfer all that history, and I'll, it would would have taken a little bit to do. So just being able to really quickly make an Excel file and say perhaps that, you know, old GL is once again on the left, and then new GL would be on the right. So maybe it used to be 23557. And that's going to be turning into 1094 53, something like that. This is from the old system, this is the new system, and you just zipped down, you create every single record of those if you wanted to. As a little bit like a sneakier, I don't know if sneaky is the right way to talk about it. But a, let's call it a life hack. You go down to your data grids, and then we are going to export this DataGrid as comma delimited.
And if we open that in Excel, we'll see it basically looks like everything that we've got here. But then I can actually just get rid of let's say, I want to get rid of all of these other columns. And so now I've only got the GL Code and the description. And then so I could really easily go through, I could get an export from my new financial system, I can Type in the new numbers and get them all in place here. And then if I delete this column, it moves everything over. And then I just save it as comma delimited. And then I'm left with just the old values and the new values. All right, and I see John, mentioning to be very careful with GL codes as it doesn't change things in the GL distribution table. If you eliminate your old codes, reports, won't have descriptors, etc. It's interesting. I'm guessing that you're speaking from experience there, John, but my understanding was that the code conversion program would go back into basically all the tables where the old records existed, and the new ones are going out. If you're just creating a new table. Absolutely what you're saying is completely right. If I was just going to create a new one and say, Now this is that record, and then go in and delete whatever the old one was, No, that would certainly be the case. But I believe that if you are doing the code conversion, it should be going through and scanning the database tables. To take a look at that. There's also saying that the deals are not adjusted in some fields like in static parameters. It's interesting. Well, that would need to be something that will write up so I see what John's saying, and we'll do some testing. I don't know when the last time he worked on this, John was But yeah, that's this, this whole part of the program is not super widely used. So it is possible that there's a bug in there that we just aren't aware of. But like I said, we will, we'll do some testing. And we'll see what happens with that.
Seth Warren 18:14
Zach, I made a note of it here. And then yeah, I can I can test it and follow up with John here, testing wise, and then and then write it up if that's the case, because I know it's supposed to, you know, I think the process is supposed to, in theory supposed to back, you know, back check all of the tables that are related to the GL Code in the first place. So if we're missing, you know, some of our logic is missing some of that, then we'll definitely have to get that looked at. But I just wanted to let you know, I got it noted here. So I'll test on my end.
Zach Malloch 18:44
Yeah, and what Seth mentioned is, I mean, the way I like to think of it is that code conversion is really supposed to be a find and replace. So it's doing the Ctrl F in your database and finding everywhere this old record existed and then doing basically a ctrl v paste to then replace all of the old values with the newer value, or to merge the records together once again, if that was something that we were going to be going with here. But that is definitely what I wanted to primarily talk about in regard to the code conversion. And we have 10 minutes left, I haven't really seen too many questions coming in other than some of John's comments, which we of course, very much appreciate and will hopefully make this program even better for everybody once you get there. I guess
Seth Warren 19:32
I was gonna say is that just the nothing in the q&a so far
Zach Malloch 19:36
Okay. I guess I would be kind of curious if anybody has used code conversion, since implementation. And if you have what you might have used it for or if you are looking at this and kind of seeing the multiple record option or some of the ways that we can work with the database after it's been created, and then kind of massage it to customize it to do what we want us want it to do. Okay. Does anybody have any ideas about what they want to do with this? And unfortunately, oh, I can grab a cat if there's nothing else that comes in. But, but yeah, and John is, let's see. So Rochelle is saying, I'm interested in the GL conversion. We're changing everything at the city level. So yeah, stay tuned. And actually, Seth, maybe you could make a note to add Rochelle to that. Yeah. Conversation, once you figured out whether or not it needs an enhancement or not,
Seth Warren 20:34
I can do that.
Zach Malloch 20:37
And John was saying that he works really well for cleaning up areas, activity section codes and similar things. And yeah, that's kind of the basic stuff that we've got. And Sandy saying that she uses it frequently. And facility and activity codes hasn't used it in GL though, Maureen is saying that she would like to know about this, too, because she wants to be updating GL codes before too long as well.
Seth Warren 21:02
Yeah, I got Maureen's name down here, too.
Zach Malloch 21:04
Very good. I appreciate that little bit of extra feedback. But without anything else, at the moment, I'm going to say that we can go ahead and turn things down. That's not what I normally say, normally, Bret's here, and so take us in for a landing or something. And he's not here and everything goes crazy. But it's easy. We made it through. And we have recorded this, we'll be posting it. So Rochelle is asking why would we use code conversion versus clone? And that's a really, really good question. So it really depends on it comes down primarily to efficiency in history. So if you've already done a lot of work to make something, you could very well clone that. And then you have a new version of it. And you're just adjusting things from that clone version, but especially had something like a little bit higher up in the stream. So let's say that you've already been going for a while and you realize that you have a facility location, that that that code is not really where you want it to be. But you've already have that the wrong code linked to some facilities, where you could certainly clone and create a new facility location, but there would be no way of changing the location in the facility that already exists. I can't adjust that Field. And then I could, of course, come into each of the facilities that have that old location, clone it and give the new code the new location, then I'm doing all of that one by one. And if I just do a conversion from the old location code to a new one, it's doing that find replace. Pardon me, and I'm just going through it in the background back into the system. Let me take a sip of tea, Seth, fill in for me.
Seth Warren 22:58
Yeah. So then, the other thing here to Rochelle is just that, if you do a code conversion, and John mentioned this in the chat here, too. If you do code conversion with an activity that has enrollments, then you can get that corrected. But if you were to clone that activity, and change the code, and none of those enrollments come over in the Clone image in the cloning, so then you'd have to transfer the roster over, which would add another step where the code conversion could just go and update the code while leaving all the enrollments in place. So I guess you could make the same argument for Facility Reservation as well, if you have future reservations in a facility, and you clone that facility over and change the code? Well, none of those reservations are tied to the new facility, they're, they're still tied to the original one, where if you could convert it, you still have all your reservations in place.
Zach Malloch 23:47
Exactly right. The other thing is that once you get history, you now can no longer delete an item. Like if I just delete this, you know that I have no history on that one. But if I have finance, I believe Nope, I hit section management. Well, let's just try to delete one of these guys. It says the section cannot be deleted, it has enrollees. So that's another area where like, if I realized that there was an error in here, and there had been a transaction, even if then somebody cancelled out of it, there's still that transaction history attached to this activity, which prevents you from deleting it. So by doing the conversion, it allows you to make sure you're not leaving old bad information in here, you're just taking the thing that was bad and turning it into something that's good in the way that you want it to be.
So and see. So Misty is asking if you do a code conversion for Pass Management, would you want to select Merge, so it merges all of your previous passes? And that's a really good question. I can see why you would follow that logic to that direction, but it's really so like, let's say that you had resident senior as a pass and then you had senior resident as a pass and you had two different people create it, but it is supposed to be the same thing. It's supposed to be your senior pass for residents. But it's just in there as two different codes. So if you're converting it from senior resident to resident senior, then you would merge those two records because the wreck the the code that you're having it turned into shares code that's already existing. So then it's going to combine everything into that one record at that point. Hopefully that makes sense. All right. Well, for whatever reason, my voice is finishing up before the half hour is completely done. You see, the same pass? It's the same pass the pass code name was created incorrectly. Yeah. So if you have the old record that was created incorrectly, then you created the new one. That is right. And you also want to convert the old one, then you would do that merge record, when you if you're not using the merge record, you would assume that you converting whatever the bad data is into something new, that doesn't exist already. That's the main piece. Yeah. And for John, I think what So John is asking how to handle merging two codes, if there are differences between them, for example, I'm going to just extrapolate from your question, that we have one record that's called like Resident pass, and the one that's called pass resident, and maybe one is a punch, pass, and one is a regular pass, or maybe one has different fees set up to it than the other. I believe that if you tell it to merge records, it's basically going to convert all of the history to whatever the new version of that record is, but then actually, that's a good question. Because now I'm thinking, well, for that individual person that converts over, I believe, it would still be a punch path, it would still be whatever the original Type of paths is, it's just on the file management side, you're going to end up with just one record, and it's going to be the one that is set up the way. Or it's going to be the one that destination, the one that you're merging into, was set up as. So I'm pretty sure that that is how it's gonna work. Seth, did you have a
Seth Warren 27:12
No, I think so too. At first I was thinking of it just like if you were doing like a household merge, and you were merging one household and into the other, you know, the two household would merge into the from household. You know, even if the birth dates are different, or the email addresses are different. And, and so I was thinking it would be that way too. But, but then again, it's not an actual like transaction where you're like, where somebody is being assigned, like something completely different. So I'm starting to second guess myself a little bit there.
Zach Malloch 27:42
Let's just try this test hunch. Let's go blank record.
Seth Warren 27:59
Kind of like Inception, right. If you go into one dream from another dream, you know this.
Zach Malloch 28:07
Alright, so we'll do September 1 to November 30. And we'll just call this Test punch. And we'll just turn this on to say that is punch per day.
And we'll just call it Test punch with no space.
I'm going to merge the record without spaces into the record with spaces. And I'm also going to start this on the 30th and go until February of next year, just so we're seeing something different and also sets up punch paths. So if it proves we're going to merge from test punch with no space into test punch with spaces, and we'll see what the which one we're ending up with basically, and I'll just actually we'll just take a screenshot of this. We have direct comparison. At least at least we can see the details we're looking for. Alright, so now we're going to do a code conversion real quick single record pass. And the one we're converting from is test. With no space and we're converting it into test punch with a space I'm going to tell it to marriage records.
So sending back to the server processing, so within a minute, we should get a notification saying that it's done. Conversion is completes. Okay, and when I refresh this, we should only have one.
Seth Warren 30:18
Oh, can you to unselect it though?
Zach Malloch 30:22
Oh, maybe I do.
Seth Warren 30:24
Yeah, like, if you just yeah, if you just Yeah. And then try.
Zach Malloch 30:28
There we go.
Seth Warren 30:28
Yeah, that's been that's been a thing for a little while here.
Zach Malloch 30:35
So we got the spaces for this. Yeah. And we we get the, in the, in the case of a conversion, it is merging. And basically getting rid of everything related to the file management record on the first record, and then pulling it into pulling out are associating the people with those records to this new record. But basically, everything is being left as the destination record exists, if that makes sense, since. So, that is what we do. And John is making a very good point. That's why you always test this test things. Absolutely very, very easy to undo, or effectively just not care about what happened, if you are doing it in the live data, or in the Demo database, a little bit more concerning if it's in the live database, and potentially some more work to manually fix things. Thank you for those questions. And for asking me to cover some pretty important things about it. So very much appreciated. We are just a little bit past the session. Thank you for everybody that decided to stick with us. We have a course recorded this and we'll be posting it by hopefully by Monday, I think and we'll talk to you all soon.
Julia Shefcheck 31:50
Take care everyone.
Seth Warren 31:50
Sounds good.
Julia Shefcheck 31:51
Thank you.
Seth Warren 31:52
Thanks, guys.
Zach Malloch 31:52
Bye All