How to connect comments to your tree ring measurements
How to change identity of a collection member

Last update 31 Oct 2013
On comment handling

In the process of reworking a bulk of old handwritten papers with ring width measurements and transfer them to computer files, a Swedish dendro colleague wanted to easily add various comments to his collections of ring width data.

E.g. some measurement series had to be renamed for consistency. When such renaming was done he wanted to save the old sample identity with the new ring width serie. He also wanted to add descriptions of the origin of these ring width series and the finding places of the wood.

Writing these comments and descriptions into a separate .txt file would be quite error prone as such extra files can easily be overlooked or even lost. To avoid this it would be better to store comments in the actual ring width files.

Comment handling in CDendro has been much reorganized to achieve this.

Comment handling for collection members
You can save multi-line comments for collections and for collection members and also write the comments to .rwl decadal files and/or copy them to a separate .txt file!

Single line comments are shown directly on the screen as for the last member in the picture above.

Multi-line comments are automatically indicated with a "..." at the end of their first line as shown above at (1).

To inspect a multi-line comment or to edit a comment, right-click on the line for that collection member. This will open the edit window (3). You can also use the edit button to open that window. - As a reminder, see the text at (2).

Change of member identity

Note the "New member id:"-field above! With this you can change the identity of a member.
Changed identities can only be saved in a decadal formatted file (.rwl, .fh) (not in .fil files!).

Attributes for sample members of Heidelberg-formatted files (.fh)
The Heidelberg file format has a section of attribute keys before the actual measurement data of a sample. You can assign a value to each such key, see example below.
HEADER: 
KeyCode=1AD0046A 
Length=136 
Location=Amsterdam 
Species=QUSP 
WaldKante= 
SapWoodRings= 
TreeNo=0 
CoreNo=0 
DateEnd=1529 
Comment=rapport ontbreekt 
Project=99.058 
DATA:Tree 
   239   175   111   128   219   246   196   115   192   266 
   148   175   128   169   135   152   162   115   105   118 
You can register such keyed data if you click on the "Edit properties"-button above.

If the list of property keys do not contain those you want, you may edit the key list itself - press the Add or Remove Property Names-button to do that!

Note: If you write a heidelberg-formatted file with property keys to a .rwl file, the key information is nevertheless preserved as well-structured comments, so that you may later convert that file back into .fh format.

Comment handling for the collection itself
Click in the upper textbox (1) when you want to edit data for the collection itself. This will open a separate edit window where you can enter a comment (2) and that data which is normally found at the beginning of most .rwl files in the ITRDB.

When there is a comment saved for a collection, this is notified as shown above at (3).
To see the comment, you can either scroll down in the textbox or click in it to open the edit window.

Saving comments
When you save a collection you have a number of alternatives as shown above.

When you save as a .fil file all your comments data will be written into the file so you can get it back when you open it again later. In contrast to a .rwl file or .fh file, a .fil-type file does not contain any ring width data - only references (pointers) to files containing the actual data.

When you save WITHOUT comments to e.g. a .rwl file the comments are collected and saved in a .txt file which can be included with the .rwl file when sent to e.g. the ITRDB.

When you save as .rwl WITH COMMENTS, the member comment lines are written like:

NMKV01A 1790    19    19   999
NMKV01A #### North wall at the west gable, block 2 from down.
NMKV01B 1730    68   135   147    62    58    41    49    84    80    73

This follows the convention that a row which cannot be properly decoded as a ring width row should be handled as a comment.

A comment line for the file itself is written like:

NMKV   1 House of 1792, Krokvik, Namdo, 5912.439N 1841.750E  PCAB
NMKV   2 Sweden       Most Norway spruc    5M  5912N1842E          1664 1803
NMKV   3 Lars-Ake Larsson
NMKV    #### Samples taken in August 2005.
NMKV01A 1700   374   442   364   406   539   387   254   176   147   145

I.e. it is placed directly after the normal .rwl header information and with the year-field filled with ####.

Any comment may consist of several comment lines, one after the other.

Comment handling for samples
In CooRecorder you can add a comment to your coordinate measurements.
When you open a coordinate file in CDendro, you will see any comment created in CooRecorder.
Click in the comment text box to edit it.

If you add a sample with a comment to a collection, also that comment will by default be copied to the collection.

Now then, if you store information in your sample comments, which you really do not want to tranfer to a collection?
Then use the menu command "Settings/More settings" and uncheck "Copy sample comments when adding samples to collections or when opening a sample from a collection (double-click)."


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