There are two databases maintained on the ChessieDB website: one for Dogs, and one for Contacts (breeders and owners). They both compliment each other -- when viewing a dog's information page, the breeder and owner contact information will be shown, and when viewing a contact's profile, the dogs owned and bred by that contact will listed bellow the contact information.

Before you can update your contact profile, you first have to find it. Use the Find -> Contact link on the left-side menu, enter your family name and press "Search Contacts". From the results page(s), you can choose to view each contact's profile, before using the appropriate update link. If you don't already have a contact profile, you'll have to Submit -> New Contact first. Existing contacts with similar names will be displayed for your review, in case you already have a contact profile. If none of the displayed contacts is you, or no matching contacts are shown, you may continue and submit a new contact profile.

After you update or submit a new contact, the information will be placed in a pending queue and will be imported into our database a few days later. The CONTACT STATS section in the left-side menu shows when the last contact was imported. The new or updated contact profile will be available on the website once those pending contacts have been imported.

Please note: When viewing a contact's profile page, the dogs owned and bred by that contact will listed bellow the contact information. You can affect this list by updating a dog's information (use the [Update Dog] link when viewing pedigrees, etc.). Each dog can be associated with up to three owners and breeders. The dog update page includes a lookup feature to find and associate contacts.

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I took a break from coding new features for the website during the holidays. The contact search and litter submission features were almost done, so I sat down this morning and finished-up the contact search. It's a fairly simple search for the moment, and I'll be adding more advanced search options in the future (to search by state or region, for judges, club members, etc.). The current search page allows you to select a specific kennel from a list, or search for contacts by first and last names. On the results page, you can click on the [View Profile] or [Update Contact] links.

If you have any problems with the contact search, please let me know.

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The contact database has grown enough to start coding new features based on the information it contains. There are three new items on the left-side menu: Kennel, Breeder, and Owner Directories. If you've specified a kennel name, a state or province, and a country in your contact profile, your kennel will appear in this directory (all three fields are required). If the directory gets too long, I may had a filter to show only kennels with dogs associated with their contact profile. So if you're the breeder of one or more dogs in our database, it would be best if you update those dog records and include yourself as the breeder.

The Breeder Directory is similar to the Kennel Directory, except that first and last names are displayed instead of the kennel name, and the contact profile must be associated with one or more dogs as a breeder. The Owner Directory is the same, except the contact profile must be associated as an owner. In all cases, the contact profile must include a state or province, and country.

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Modifying the Owners and Breeders associated with a dog's record is now a lot easier. I just finished a Contact Lookup feature to locate contacts (by First Name, Last Name, or Kennel Name) and add them to a dog's record. When you're on an [Update Dog] page, you'll find a section titled Associated Owners and Breeders where you can enter Owner and Breeder Contact IDs. The Contact Lookup link (a popup window) in this section can be used to search for contacts, view their profile, list dogs owned and/or bred, and add their Contact IDs to the dog's update form. The Contact Lookup includes instructions in case the contact you're looking for is not in our database. You can also go straight to the New Contact Submission page and search for, update, or add a contact.

As part of the 3rd and final phase of the Contact Database functionality, I still have to code a proper Contact Search page. This will include such features as searching for all breeders, breeders by state, stud down owners, judges, etc.

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On November 3rd I announced the 1st Phase of a Breeder/Owner Contact database. This consisted of a Contact Profile page that displayed their postal address, phone numbers, website, etc., along with a list of dogs owned and/or bred by that contact. As expected, the reaction to this new feature was very positive -- I already knew of several Breeders waiting patiently for this. :-) Of course the usefulness of these new pages was limited since the Contact Update (2nd Phase) and Contact Search (3rd Phase) functionality was not available yet. It took a lot of hard work, but I've finally finished the 2nd Phase: the Contact Updates. There are a couple of ways to update a contact; On the left-side menu you'll find a new "SUBMIT A New Contact" link, on the Dog Info pages you'll find an [Update Contact] link for associated Owners and Breeders, and finally on the Contact Profile page there's also an [Update Contact] link. I've tried to test everything as best I can, but there could still be one or two bugs left. If you have any problems, even if it's just a page layout issue, please let me know.

Aside from updating the contact profiles, you can also add / change the Owner and Breeder IDs when updating a dog. For now, there's no way to easily find those ID numbers -- that's part of the 3rd and final phase. If you try and submit a new contact using your First and Last Names, you might be able to locate your Contact ID from it's simple name check. The actual search pages will offer many more options, including some small pop-up search windows in strategic locations.

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A few days ago I finally had an idea on how to add breeder and owner contact information to the database. We could have used a drop-down list with all the breeder/owner names, but this is really not scalable. We could have also used a text box to let people enter contact names, then checked for existing contacts with those names, but this is error prone and complicated, especially for duplicate names. It finally occurred to me that I could use the contact's record ID. Once created, a contact's ID number never changes. This will allow someone to simply enter an ID number to link a contact to a dog. I'll have to provide a small pop-up search box to find those ID numbers, but this will be a lot more elegant and less error prone than using contact names. I still have to rely on the contact's first and last names to import updates to their profile (a small limitation of the Breeder's Assistant application we use), so this means that once a contact record has been created, the first and last names cannot be changed (except if you send an e-mail and we update the database record manually). All other information, like postal address, e-mail address, telephone numbers, etc. can all be modified. I've also found a way to allow duplicate names, which is essential for the number of contacts we expect to maintain (we already have close to 1,000 contacts in the database).

There are three big steps to implementing this, each taking several days to code: creating a profile page to view the contact's information, an update page to allow additions of new contacts and modifying existing contacts, and finally a search page to find contact IDs, breeders by location, etc. I've been working on the first phase (creating a profile page) for the past few days, and finally have something that looks pretty good. You can view Janet Wilson's, Jane Pappler's, or my own profile page for an example. You can also view Pete's Info Page to see how the owner and breeder links will be presented. I know everyone will want to create their own contact page now, and depending on how much time I have available, the update feature might be done in another week or two. After that I'll work on the search page, and then we can finally allow contact changes on the dog [Update] page. I expect everything will be finished by Xmas or so.

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