Chad Petrovay

Category: The Museum System

  • Standardizing your Constituent Phone Numbers

    Standardizing your Constituent Phone Numbers

    Did you ever notice that American and Canadian phone numbers are both prefaced with the international calling code of “1”? This is because twenty countries, primarily in North America and the Caribbean, participate in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). Let’s examine how these numbers are structured, establish standards for data entry and then apply those standards to our existing records.

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  • Putting the Umbrella Away

    Putting the Umbrella Away

    I like a nice clean user interface, unencumbered by extraneous options. I also like to restrict access to modules and fieldsets that our institution isn’t currently using, as a way of preventing “rogue” data entry. The Insurance Policy module is one such example, with our blanket policy there is no need for tracking this in the database. And even if we did, there would only be a handful of users that would need access to this information. So I’m going to modify my security profiles to restrict access to this module. (more…)

  • Perpetual Calendar: Updating a Date Field in a Saved Query

    Perpetual Calendar: Updating a Date Field in a Saved Query

    I have a saved query in TMS that I run every day. And every day, I have to change the date field to reflect the current date. Perhaps in the future, Gallery Systems will provide a new relationship “Is Today” for date fields, but until that happens here’s a hack to try.

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  • Improving the Quality of your Constituent Addresses

    Improving the Quality of your Constituent Addresses

    Since we do not tend to include the country name when addressing domestic mail, users tend to forget to enter this into the Constituent address. Having the country specified can enable you to perform certain queries, such as what is the geographic distribution for outgoing loans in a given year, and enables better formatting of the display address. Here are a few scripts I use for managing periodic maintenance on addresses in my database. (more…)

  • Select Top 3 * From [Uses for Select]: Part 3

    Select Top 3 * From [Uses for Select]: Part 3

    So far, we’ve examined how to use the SELECT statement in SQL to create SQL Views for use in Crystal Reports, and as List Views in TMS. Now we are going to use the SELECT statement to create an alert in TMS. (more…)