Observation Fields not allowing 'Edit Field' by any manager or creator

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1

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Hello,

I am running into a bit of an issue and hoping someone might have some advice. I recently started to manage a project that has been running for a few years. In the project, there are observation fields for surveyors to fill out and I am trying to make them more user friendly (drop down options vs. having users manually enter).

I am currently set as a manager in the project. When I click ‘Edit Project’ and scroll down to the observation fields, there are two options under each field: ‘Remove’ or ‘Edit Field’. Behind ‘edit field’, it notes ‘Fields can only be edited by the people who created them and site curators.’ If I try to click ‘edit field’, it takes me back to the project homepage and I receive a message saying ‘You don’t have permission to do that’.

I reached out to the creator of the project, who is still a member of it and is also a manager. I explained the issue and was going to see if she could edit the fields for me, while I try to figure out a work around. She went into ‘edit project’, tried the steps I took, and also received the ‘You don’t have permission’ message.

With that said, I am in a bit of a pinch. It seems that nobody who is a manager or an admin in the project is able to edit the observation fields. While we can still have surveyors type things in manually, it is less than ideal to not be able to edit any of the observation fields that were previously established. I tried to set up a new observation field to see if there were any issues and there weren’t.

Has anyone encountered this issue before? Are there any work arounds that people are aware of? Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks much!

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3

the person who created the observation field is not the same as the person who created the project.

you probably want to create a new observation field and use that for your project. if you were (able) to change the existing observation field, you might mess things up for all the other people and projects that use it.

5 Likes
4

I’m not sure about that, is there a way I can locate within the project?

5

site curators are site curators. project curators are different. neither set of curators are really relevant to the issue at hand.

1 Like
6

Thank you, that definitely helps me understand why we are unable to edit! So observation fields aren’t project specific; they could possibly be used by any project on iNat?

I think you are right that creating my own, new observation fields seems to be the work around. My next question is what would happen to the data we collected in the past, if I remove the old obs. field and create my own? For example, if I removed field ‘Building Name or Address’ from the project and created a new field ‘Building Name or Address [ProjectName]’, would any data we collected for ‘Building Name or Address’ in the past disappear? My concern is whether removing the current obs fields and adding new ones could cause me to lose old project data somehow.

7

no. any existing observation fields are tied to the observation at that point. your project setup only defines the fields that must be present at the time an observation is added to the project.

if in doubt, you can always create a dummy project and some dummy observations and do an experiement.

another option you have is to set up a unique project for each season + year that you do monitoring, and then group those projects under an umbrella project. this way, each project can have unique fields. the complication with this is that if you have members or journals, etc., that may make it cumbersome for folks to join each individual project, plus an umbrella project.

8

I’m not sure how this is amenable to a dropdown? Unless there are only specific addresses eligible for the project?

9

See continuing conversation at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/removing-an-observation-field-without-losing-data/54942