February 1, 2013
CDD’s BFs are here. Despite the pop-culture “best friends” acronym, BF stands for Batch Fields, but we feel that they will become your best friends soon enough! Batch fields allow for customization of molecule registration rules to suit each vault’s needs. They apply to vaults with and without formal chemical registration, and are fully integrated with CDD’s data import and validation, allowing each group to ensure that pertinent batch-level data is captured correctly.
Define Batch Fields
Batch Fields are defined by the vault administrator, and apply to all batches across all projects in the vault. Click on “Add/Edit Batch Fields” on the Registration Rules sub-tab of the Manage Vault tab:
Add/Remove/Rearrange fields
Click on the “Add a batch field”, enter a name, and set the available settings (see below). Click “Remove” next to any batch field. Caution: when you remove an existing field, you are permanently deleting all the values stored in that field throughout the vault. To rearrange fields, click the “drag” icon. The order defined on the Registration Rules tab will determine the order of fields in the rest of the application, including the batch creation form, and the search page.
Field Settings
Name: A unique name for the field. This name will appear throughout the application. Include units of measurement for numeric data. Data type: Data types include date, number and text. You may not edit the data type of a field that already has values in the database. Uniqueness Flag: Check this flag if values in this field must be unique across the vault (batches/molecules/projects). This is a good way to designate additional Batch Identifiers, such as lab notebook number or vendor lot number. This field is: This setting determines whether the field is optional, required, or conditionally required during new batch registration. For those fields set as conditionally required, only one of the grouped fields must be populated. The field may also be autogenerated by CDD, and thus not subject to editing.
Adding Data to Batch Fields
Once Batch fields are defined, they are presented to users throughout the application: manually creating a new batch, viewing batch details, importing new data or exploring data on the Search page. Legacy batches that are missing data for the newly defined fields may be updated at any time either manually or via file import.Migrating Legacy Data
Previously CDD handled additional batch data by storing it in the batch notes, so as part of this release we will be working with each vault to migrate data out of the batch notes and into new fields. We are also happy to assist with tasks such as merging two existing fields. Please contact support to discuss how we can help.Searching Batch Fields
The custom batch fields you have added can be searched with all current keyword search functionality under the Keyword section of the Explore Data/Search tab.
- Choose the batch field you wish to search from the keyword drop-down
- Enter an asterisk (“ * ”) into the keyword search
- Returned results will include molecules with at least one batch that has a value in the chosen field.
Bonus: Significant Figures, Decimals, and Integer Formatting of Readouts
You can now specify exactly how you want your numeric readouts displayed: