List Design Dialog

List Design Dialog

The List Design dialog is the place where you set up the way a check list is created. You get to this dialog by opening up a List View and then pressing the Design button or selecting List->Design from the main menu.

The list design dialog is a tabbed dialog. Along the top of the dialog you will see three "tabs". Each tab corresponds to a different "page" in the dialog. Press one of the tabs to expose that page.

This dialog is a bit different from other DairyLive dialogs because it has no OK or Cancel button. You can leave this dialog open while you go back to the list view and try out your new settings. To close the dialog, click on the Close button. The dialog will also be closed when you close the list view.

The list design dialog has three tabs:

The General Tab
The Data Tab
The Additional Data Tab

The General Tab: The General tab has five fields that control the name, RFID note, default event type, date, and refreshing of the list.

List Name: Type in a short description of the list, such as "Heifers Due to Calve in the Next Week". The list name can be up to 100 characters.

RFID Note: Type in up to 8 characters as a note to be sent to I.D.ology readers when the list is exported, such as "PGCHK"

Default Event Type: Select the type of event that you would like to be the default event when you enter an event from the check list.

Use This "As Of" Date: A list can be generated relative to any point in time. Normally you will generate a list "as of" today, but you may want to see what things were like a month ago or a year into the future. Change the "As Of" date if you want to. See Entering Dates for information about how to enter dates.

Automatically Refresh...: You may have noticed that the list view contains a Refresh button. When you press this button, the list is regenerated from the current data. If you want a list to always remain "up to date", check this checkbox. Note, however, that this may slow things down, because the list could be regenerated whenever you make a change elsewhere in DairyLive.

The Data Tab: The Data tab provides a way to define what fields are shown in the list and what animals are selected to be in the list.
: This tab has a table with four columns. Each row in the table defines a field to either show, select upon, or both. The columns are:

Field	This value is the name of a single "property" or "attribute" of an animal. Barn Name, Last Milk Wt, and Due Date are examples of an animal property. Some properties are derived from event types, for example, Last Confirmed PG where Confirmed PG is the name of the event type.
Relationship	This value is used when you want this field to select an animal for the list. For example, if the property name is Last Milk Wt, you can select "more than" from the Relationship column to restrict the list to include only the animals whose last milk weight was greater than a certain number.
Value	This column applies only if you selected a relationship for this field. The value that you want to compare against is placed in this column.
Show	If you do not want this field to be shown in the generated list, remove the check from the checkbox in this column. For example, you may have a Lactation Status field with a relationship of "= Fresh". Since only animals that are fresh will be shown in the list, you do not really need to show this property in the generated list.

When you create a new list (see Herd Explorer), the list will initially contain two fields: Barn Name (or Number) and In Herd equals Yes. Presumably you will always want to see the barn names and you do not want to include culled animals in the list.

Adding and Inserting New Fields: To add a new row to the table, select the field name from the first column in the last row. This row will have a star to the left of it. Click on the arrow to drop down the list. The field names will be sorted alphabetically.
: To insert a row in the middle of the table, click in the left margin next the row where you want to insert the new row. Then click the Insert button.

Deleting and Moving Rows Around: You can delete a row in the table by clicking next to the row in the left margin and then clicking the Delete button. To move rows around, click in the left margin next to the row you want to move, and then click on the Up or Down button.

AND's and OR's: The selection criteria for a list can get rather complicated. By default, an animal must satisfy all of the relationships in order to be included in a list. There are times, though, when you want the list to include animals that are the "union" of two other lists. For example, you may want to create a master breeding list that contains all heifers that are at least 16 months old OR cows that have been open for more than 45 days. If you have a field "Age more than 15 months" and another field "DIM more than 45", you will not get any heifers who have not yet calved because they have never been in milk.

To accomplish what you want, you can set up two sets of list criteria and "OR" them together. Here's how to do this: In the first part of the table, add fields for Barn Name and "Age more than 15 months". Then add another field for "DIM more than 45". Now click in the left margin next to "DIM more than 45" and click on the OR button. You will see a row open up containing only the word "OR". When DairyLive generates this list, it will find all the animals that satisfy the criteria in the first part of the list and combine them with all the animals that satisfy the criteria in the second part of the list.

If you set up a list containing OR's, remember to repeat any fields that you want to apply to all animals. In the previous example, you should repeat the "In Herd equals Yes" field in both parts of the list so that you don't get any culled animals in the final list.
: NOTE: Another way to combine lists together is to set up separate simple lists and then use the Merge Lists operation to merge the lists together. See Merged List View.

Sorting: You can set a default sort field and ordering. Select the field you want to sort on and then click on either the "Asc" (ascending) or "Desc" (descending) radio button. When the list is generated, DairyLive will sort on this field. If you do not specify a particular field, DairyLive will always sort on the first field.

Using Dates in a List: Some of the animal properties are time-related, for example, Last Calving Date. When this is the case, you can specify whether the date was on, before, or after some number of days, weeks, months, or years, either "from now" or "ago". For example, suppose you want to select animals whose calving date is in the next 30 days. You would add a field to the table as "Due Date" "On or Before" "30 Days from Now".

The Additional Data Tab: Your list can contain additional data. The Additional Data Tab has three areas. The top area allows you to select whether to include daily summary test day data for some previous number of days. These data are added as additional columns to the generated list. If you are capturing individual milkings instead of daily totals, you can select values in the middle area. (Many of these values are specific to the AIC system.) The bottom area allows you to select whether to include summary data, such as total, average, and standard deviation. If you select one of the checkboxes in the bottom area, your list will show the summary data separately at the bottom of the List View.

See Also: List View; Merged List View; Animal Properties