I'm excited that Nancy would like to post stuff on this blog. I'll tag these with her name so that all the scribers can easily find her entries.
Kerfuffle with Wildcards by Nancy
When testing 4.0.1 (we are on 7.7.2 in production) I noticed that wildcards used in scribing course numbers were not behaving correctly. I filed a service request with my example. After some discussion of what should be happening, I was told to try changing a new flag in D20 DAP13. The new flag is named "Wildcard Character Match". The flag had been set to "0" as a default, meaning a wildcard matches 0 or more characters. A wildcard has always matched 1 or more characters.
It seems to me that the default for a new flag should be the way the product has always behaved. A user wanting the new functionality should be the one to go in and set it.
After I changed the flag to "1", the audits were OK. So, make sure this flag is set to 1 if a wildcard means 1 or more characters for your scribing.
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I've had a request for an example of where it would make a difference if the wildcard stands for 0 or more vs. 1 or more characters. When we started many years ago, the only option was 1 or more characters, so that is what we depend on.
ReplyDeleteOur upper-division course numbers are numbers in the one hundreds. Some numbers (either lower-div or upper-div) have an alpha character suffix. A range does not pick up alpha characters, as you know, so 100:199 does not get all upper-div, which may include 149A, 172B. Using a wildcard, 1@ does not work because that picks up 1A, 1B, 15A, 15B which are not in the one hundreds.
For one hundreds, I want three or more characters, the first of which is a 1. I use 1@@ which means a 1 followed by one or more characters followed by one or more characters. That way 1A, 1B are not picked up. It is true that 15A, 15B are picked so I have to EXCEPT them on the rule.
With @ meaning 0 or more characters, the 1@@ was picking up 1A and 1B. That does not fit with how our hundreds of blocks are scribed.
Nancy from UC Irvine
Feel free to leave a question or feel free to comment about how things are at your institution.