Tag Archives: editing

Adding a New Member

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There’s a lot of information that can be captured when adding a new member to your database.

Understanding the Add Screen

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Although this is a very busy screen, it has everything required to add a new member into the system in a very short space of time, which means it can be done at a club meeting, if you have a computer (laptop, tablet etc) with internet access. Your new member can confirm for you that the details are correct, so you don’t have to try and decipher their handwriting a day or two later!

1. The next Member Number in sequence is automatically suggested.
2. Bold Red labels show attributes which are required, plain black labels are optional information.
3. Home and Workplace Suburb/State/Postcode are automatically suggested for you
4. Record this new member’s initial fees info, method of payment and receipt number.
5. Include their vehicle data. Again, Make/Model/Bodystyle are suggested for you from your Categories info, but can be overridden. Similarly, Vehicle Colour & Trim are suggested from your existing data once you type a couple of characters. (You can choose to record all the official Colour Codes and Descriptions for the model vehicles your club is dedicated to, if you wish. You can just enter "Blue", or you can leave it as Not Recorded if you’re not interested in recording this information.

Adding a New Member (continued)

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1. An example of the Make/Model/Body suggested text to describe the Vehicle
2. All Date fields have a Calendar control "widget" to select dates (and times, where appropriate).
3. When you’re finished, click Add. Any essential columns that are empty or invalid will be highlighted for correction, or you’ll go straight to the Member View page for this newly created record.

Adding a New Member (continued) Correcting Missing Info

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Note the highlighted text-boxes showing fields that require information that has not been provided.

Adding Information

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OurCarClub allows you to view, edit, add or delete information. We’ve looked so far at navigating around and viewing records. Let’s look now at how we might add some new information to the system.

Understanding the different types of information

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There are fundamentally two types of information:

  • records, which are specific “things”, such as Members, Vehicles, Events, Assets and so on.
  • categories, which describe how you group your records. Most clubs will have a couple of different Membership Types, Vehicles might be classified as Original, Restored or Modified; Assets might be “Computer Equipment”, or “Merchandise”. For most categories, you can start with the default, suggested list of values, and adjust them as you see fit.

In this example, we are going to add a Membership Type. We’ve decided to introduce a “Family Membership” option.
Click on the Member Types link under the Categories menu item.

Start with the List View – What have we got in our system already?

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We’re now looking at the existing Membership Types, and whatever columns from the Show/Hide option we’ve adopted. We currently have "Member", "Associate Member" and "Honorary Life Member". Click on "Add a new Membership Type"

Adding a new Membership Type

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Labels in Red signify pieces of information that must be provided for this item to be valid. In this case, we need to provide a short description for the new item.

  1. I’ve typed “Family Member” here, as that is what we call our new Membership Type.
  2. This particular category also has optional values for Joining Fee and Renewal Fee, which I’ve also filled in.
  3. To Save this new record, click the “Add” button.

All Add screens function in this way. If any items require a value and one hasn’t been supplied, or data of the wrong type is entered (such as text where a date belongs), the fields in question will be flagged in red for correction.
It’s also important to bear in mind that you cannot have two records for the same thing. If you already had a record labelled “Family Member” and you attempted to create another, you would get an error message alerting you to this fact.

Now, having clicked “Add”, we should see…

What did we just do?!

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… the result, which is our freshly minted Membership Type. A few things to note about this screen:

  1. A message appears beneath the menu bar reminding you that a new record was added.
  2. Obviously, having just created this record, it has no related records. But once we create a new member and assign them Family Membership, this view screen will show that Person, as we looked at in the section on Navigation. NB: although you can create a new Member from here, it’s not the recommended, easiest way of doing that. See the next chapter.
  3. Click on the "Add a new Membership Type" button again to add another record if required, or "List Membership Types" to show our new, slightly longer list of types.

Vehicle View

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Just as a Member has many attributes and related pieces of information, so too does a vehicle.

Viewing an Individual Vehicle

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All View pages are similar in design: the left hand side has the attributes of the item being viewed, with Edit and Delete buttons. The boxes to the right and underneath show related pieces of information, where there may be none, one or many related records.

  1. Attributes of this vehicle. Any fields that are shown as links denote a relationship to a category or item. Clicking on “Authentic”, for example, would take you to a page showing all the vehicles thus classified. (More on this later…)
  2. You can upload an image of your member’s vehicle from this page, or you can provide a URL to an existing image on the web. OurCarClub supports a main image for each vehicle, and up to 8 additional images. This should be sufficient for clubs in jurisdictions where photographic records of vehicles on “Club Plates” need to be maintained (such as VicRoads).
  3. Another example of linked information. This vehicle may have attended many events, and you can navigate to a specific attendance record via the link.

List of Vehicles

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Let’s look at a different List Screen, the records of Vehicles in your club. As you can see, it’s quite similar to the Member List.

List of Vehicles

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As mentioned previously, all List screens share common features: click or drag the headers to sort or re-arrange, filter and export your data.

1. The Show/Hide columns button has been clicked, showing the additional columns available for inclusion in this view. Click any of the check-boxes to show/hide that column, and click the Show/Hide columns button again to dismiss.
2. Click on the "Summary" of any vehicle to go to its "View" screen.
3. All Vehicles have a Status. Click on a Status to show information about that Status, and a list of all Vehicles that match that status. This item to group to item navigation is a key feature of the OurCarClub system. It is extremely easy to navigate around your data.

List Vehicles (continued)

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Here is that same screen with the Vehicle Class and Rego columns added to the view.

Views – Member View

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Examining a single member’s data

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(That’s enough fiddling with the themes – back to the original Red & Blue theme).

View Screens follow a standard design: the information about the particular record is on the left, and related information is grouped in boxes to the right and underneath. Related records are generally things we need to track over time, or where there may be none, one or many items linked to the main item (in this case a Member). A member may have many vehicles now, or they may have none. They may have previously owned vehicles that they have since sold. Obviously, if there was only one field in the Member record called "Vehicle", it would severely limit our ability to track this sort of thing.

1. All the standard fields for a member: names, addresses, contact details.
2. Edit / Delete this record.
3. Navigate to the next or previous member (by member-number)
4. Add a New Member, return to the List View, perform a Search, or open the Help Panel.
5. Member’s Vehicles, both Current and Previous can be seen in this tab. Click on the description or "Ownership Details" to navigate to the details of the Vehicle
6. Subscription info – curent membership info, and previous subscriptions (renewals). So each annual renewal is recorded for posterity.
7. Similarly to Subs, if this member has been or is a Committee Member, details are shown in this panel.

The sharp-eyed reader may have realised "hey, a Member can have move house, or change email address, or phone number! Over time they may have many of these things." And that’s true. But we’re not really interested in capturing an accurate history of this. It’s not relevant to managing your car club. As long as the address in the system is where they live now, where they used to live is not terribly important. We’re interested in ensuring any mail we might send today gets to them, not where we might have sent mail a year ago.

The other half of the Member screen

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As mentioned above, all the boxed content shows "related information", where there may be no data, one or many related records for a particular member. In OurCarClub, anything that looks like a link is a link, and it is easy to navigate from individual record to similar records. (See the Vehicle pages for more examples of this.)

1. Clicking on an Attendance Record will take you to a view of that member’s attendance in that event. (Attendance contains details of which car they brought to the event, amongst other things.)
2. Virtually every page has a Help link at the bottom to show context-sensitive information about the page you’re viewing.
3. If you have access to multiple Car Club’s OurCarClub systems – including this "Demo Club", you can use the "Switch" link to access the alternate systems.

Lists – Member List

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All data in your OurCarClub system can be displayed in a "List" context, that can be sorted, filtered, re-ordered and exported.

Understanding a List Page

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Note: the “Green” theme is shown on this page.

This particular shot is showing the List of Members, which has a few items peculiar to that type of record. But every collection of records of a certain type (i.e. all Vehicles, all Members, all Types of Assets) can be manipulated in this way.

  1. Headers: click to sort by this column, click and drag to re-order columns
  2. Click “Show/Hide Columns” to alter the list display. The settings you choose are retained next time you come to this page
  3. Type a few characters in the quick-search box to find a particular record or group of records
  4. Click on a name to View member details
  5. Click Edit or Delete to alter this record
  6. By default only current members are shown. Click this button to show ex-member details.
  7. Export all records of this type for other uses.
  8. Perform more sophisticated Searching
  9. If you find you’re going back and forth from List to View and back again, it can be more efficient to lock the view page. Once the lock is activated all the links at (4) and (5) automatically open in a new browser window or tab (depending on your browser’s settings), leaving this list view in place. The button toggles the state of the lock, and the icon to the right of the title shows the current state.