Note: these notes are for recent ODB versions, 0.9.6 and above; earlier notes are at relnotes1, and relnotes2, and relnotes3. Also, we are still providing a download link to the last 0.8 series version here. For the 0.9.7 release notes, please scroll about 50% of the way down this page, or click here. The information just below this paragraph is a log of changes made for version 1.0, which is slated for a release in mid November. Beta testers are still needed. ODB - Changes completed for the upcoming 1.0 release: * = requires conversion of previous ODB data New Features a) Ability to use fractional dollar amounts (10/15/04) * b) Added ability to use ranges in zip code searches, i.e. 10001...11999 (10/15/04) c) New Icon for ODB, greater resolution for Windows XP (10/26/04). d) Added right-click feature to main menu to allow looking up elected officials, based on 5 or 9-digit zip code. (12/14/04) e) Included the salutation field in donor reports (1/11). f) Added an "extended groups import" feature. (1/18) Also Changed the importing choices to a pull down menu. This broke custom importing; ODB would ask you to include an OLDID field even when that was not necessary. This was fixed on 7/13/05. g) Revamp of donation screen and donation/ledger codes: (1/18) -ledger "subcategory" codes can now have 2 characters. They actually can be a single letter, or a letter and a number by default they are off (invisible), however. -added ability to search by "subcategory" codes, using the same interface used to search by donation "category" codes. -the appeal codes now are stored in a list, similar to SRC codes, and the length is now restricted to three to eight characters (instead of 1 to ten). -donation entry screen reorganized, enlarged -added support for "giftcomment" field, which is a maximum of 80 characters by default, to be enabled in future -added support for "check number" field, to be enabled in future -note that type codes can still have only one character h) SRC codes may have between 3 and eight characters. (1/18) i) NEW odb setting appealcodemax can be used to limit the length of the appeal code. (1/18) FIX on 8/18, the default was not properly set... j) NEW odb setting srccodemax can be used to limit the length of the src code. Setting it to "4" will mimic the behavior of ODB currently. (1/18) k) NEW odb setting "showsubcategory" will show or hide this field (1/18) l) NEW odb setting "groupslabel" can change the terminology used for "groups." I.E. it can be changed to "sites". (1/18) m) Default sort order for people in main menu is now last name, first name. (completed 3/10) n) city state lookup (on zip code) implemented for "groups" area of ODB. (3/28) o) added option to examine duplicates 1 at a time in when importing donations (4/18) p) New export tab implemented for more intuitive export interface (4/26) Added (7/13): This interface allows you to customize the export fields and field order, with a user interface very similar to the Import screen. The buttons to move up and down in the list were mostly not working properly until 7/13). User defined fields not showing up all the time until 11/4. q) Revamped "People Entry" and "Group Entry" screens now can be expanded to have a large comments area. You must turn the setting "enlargecommentspace" to "on". r) Totally revamped "People Entry" area now organizes some of the less used codes in a small "tabbed navigation" area. This means that it is actually much easier to take advantage of the user defined field in ODB, or the date of birth, or gender fields. s) Additional user defined field added. You can now have two. t) New feature added to allow ODB to manage a second email address. The email is within the tabbed navigation area and you can completely control how the email is treated, i.e. whether it is just a second email for that person that is a backup (in which case you check no boxes) or if it is actually a second family member, or email to be used only for bulk mailings * Note: field validation added on 7/28/05 for the 2nd email. Also the checkboxes had a bug in that they were not cleared out when you closed out one record and opened another one. u) New feature added to allow user to control email list subscriptions from within ODB. For this to work, the user must use an email list service that allows a single URL to cause a person to be added or deleted. OC could offer a variant of this service to organizations who pay the ODB support fee: a PHP command page that generates the appropriate email message, using OC's server, to simulate a request by the user. * v) New field "occupation" is now included, for tracking of voters and voter list. Can be edited but cannot yet be printed. * w) Added the ability to modify the geographic categories and also to search for multiple geographic categories at once. (5/2) x) Revamped search screen, using a "tabbed" interface to allow user to use additional search criteria, including searches by street address. (5/2) y) Added feature to allow an organization to set default values for the "individual type" and "organization type" combo boxes, located in the people entry and groups entry screens (5/3) z) Added a mass "fix dates" feature, basically goes through all chosen records and fixes the membership dates to match the donations that are in the database. Operates only on the records that are chosen. This is in the form of a button on the Mass Action screen. (5/4) aa) Added the ability for ODB to include (with the installer) a sample database, and added the ability for the user to choose this as an installation option (5/6) * Made major updates in the sample database on 8/18/05. bb) Added a right-click option in groups to allow you to go a linked person (5/9) cc) Change setup step #2 so that the user may choose between two options: storing their database in the "my documents" folder or the "all users" folder. (5/10) dd) Thorough test of conversion utility. ee) Added right click option to copy email addresses ff) big improvement in summary report in Select Records screen (more room for category descriptions, printout of subcategory breakdown, left margin, bold totals. (5/19) gg) Added "Mass Update" screen to enable you to set or unset various ODB codes for the currently chosen records. Finished on 5/17. Important fix on 9/15, because with individual type or org. type or GEOG codes, ODB was replacing the existing code 2 character codes all the time, which meant that you would have "I " as the code instead of simply "I" which ODB did not like. hh) Added right-click option to "Mass Update" to allow you to copy a list of IDS to the clipboard, in the form: (101,102,103,105,110,111). The reason for this is to make it easy to exclude or include these folks from the records currently selected, using the "Advanced Query" function. I.e. you can use the syntax "ID In (101,102, 103,106)" as part of a custom query, or "ID not In (101,102, 103,106)". (5/17) ii) Added a right-click option to the main menu, Advanced Search button, to allow you to preload the advanced search screen in 6 different ways. (3/15) jj) Added Appealcode to the fields that appear when you do a donation search. So now you get the category, subcategory, and appeal code. (5/19) Note: this broke some of the donation reports, but we discovered and fixed this on 6/8/05. kk) Added a "subquery" feature to Select Records. What this means is that after you have selected any number of people or donors, you may then select again from within the first list. This is very convenient if you want to do something like find people outside of massachusetts, and then restrict the list to people who have donated in the past. (5/25) ll) Redid the "print" screen to support a new tab for print reports directly from ODB. Assumes that the reports will be printed through a 3rd party piece of software that will directly access the Access tables. Allows the user to set up any number of reports and will eventually allow the order of the listed reports to be customized by the enduser or consultant. (5/26) mm) Added red text "N O $ C A L L S" so that when a user has that checkbox checked, the info will be visible to a potential caller (6/16) This was not working properly in groups, so this was fixed (11/1) nn) Changed location of lastquery.txt to the Temporary folder for currently logged on user. oo) Working version of report viewer integration: new ODB add-in called rptview.exe created, to run reports from the command line. Print window now supports sending a date to this report runner, which can affect what the user will see. (6/20) pp) Changed the control used to show the "listview" from comctl32.ocx to mscomctl.ocx. This has the effect of showing gridlines in the listing generated by Select records, a definite plus (6/20) qq) Added feature to ODB to automatically detect incorrect screen resolution, and to offer to adjust it if the users's computer is capable of it (6/20). rr) New template format for 1.0 is implemented, and old templates are converted. The new format is based on XML (7/27). ss) Added a menu command to create a system DSN out of your ODB database. Very easy to use, you right click on mass update and choose Create ODBC DSN... (8/17) tt) ODB 1.0 had partial support for the "class" field, which is an additional pull down menu that can be turned on. I went ahead and added full support for this, though I have not tested it yet. * (8/17) uu) Added menu command (right click on mass update) to allow the user to remove "Nulls" from their ODB database tracking code fields (in both the People and Groups tables). (8/17) vv) Added ability to enter notes, with a user defined "notetype" code. Added ability to search on notes from the "Select records" window, searching by date note was entered or last updated. (8/23) FIXED notetypes on 11/8, and made it possible for notetypes to be 1 or 2 letter codes. ww) Added ability to enter pledges, with all the bells and whistles about setting up payment dates, number of installments, etc. If you change one of the settings, the others adjust as well to give you something that makes sense. (8/23) Added ability to associate a payment with a pledge, from the Add Gift (or edit gift) window. yy) Updated the "clone" feature so that the fax field is copied by default, and so that the SRC fields are also copied when you copy "all possible fields." (9/1) zz) Added new right-click option for the main menu: if you right-click on the email address, you can generate a basic email that is intended to ask the recipient to send their updated address or phone number. The email should be generated within the currently active email client. (9/10) a1) Added new right-click option for the main menu: if you right click on a contact, you will see an option to copy their information to the clipboard in Vcard format. (9/12) b1) Added reminder capability, so that if you enter a note and associate reminders with it, ODB will pop up a small icon to remind you to reconnect with these contacts by email, hard copy, or a phone call (9/14) c1) Updated zip code lookup routines in response to change by US postal service (9/28) d1) Added a right click area to eight additional buttons to allow the user to achieve the effect of a right-click without the use of the right mouse button (10/26) e1) Extended the function that reminds people to mark addresses as complete/incomplete to the 'Groups' area. (10/27) f1) Extended the right-click menu for the main "search" button so that the user can set it up for ODB to automatically open up the 'Add Note' or 'Add Pledge' window when a record is found (10/28) g1) Implemented ability to adjust the sort order for reports. (11/1) h1) Implemented the ability to include an appealcode to assign to all imported payments in a batch (11/1) i1) Added 2 new ODB settings. Extrafirstline will allow you to put any merge text you want into an additional first line on mailing labels. To use it you set it to some text such as " *EXPIRES ON [[memexpire]]*" ; note that the field names must be double bracketed. For situations where the field value is null, ODB will by default leave it blank. You can set the value of the ODB setting ExtraFirstEmptyField to something (like "N/A") to put some text in there for null fields. Currently, this works only for null date fields; not for zero-length string fields. (11/2) j1) Added email and email2 as searchable items in the Advanced Search screeen (actually, added these in August and fixed a small bug with clearing them on 11/2). k1) Added functionality to generate simple listing-reports on selected Payments and Pledges, in the Advanced Search screen. The implementation is very similar to generating simple donation reports. (11/6). l1) New, slick data entry method for People entry screen, allows you to enter the main portion of the address as a single text block (11/10). m1) First release of ODB 1.0 user guide (11/11). n1) Added preliminary support for Apartment field (11/11) The field will automatically show up if the setting showapt is turned on (11/11). o1) Added right-click on Advanced Search button feature, to look up records modified today (11/11). Extended this behavior to Groups and to records entered today (11/14) p1) Added the ability to allow accented spanish characters in places where they were once filtered For now, you have to turn on the setting "intlchars" to make this work. (11/11) q1) Added the ability to turn off filtering of "(" and ")" in phone numbers. Turn "intlphone" on to make this happen. (11/13) r1) Added the ability to specify which table you are importing from as part of an import specification. (8/1?) s1) Added right-click menu options from the History button on the main menu screen, so that you can go directly to Payment history, Notes history, or Pledges history (11/16) t1) Added ability to Omit records form the main menu screen (11/20) U1) Added item to Mass Action menu to execute a Thank you note generation script (11/20) This required adding an ODB setting to store the start date for thank yous. V1) Added item to Print menu to print currently chosen records to default printer, in the user's preferred label format. This required adding an ODB setting to store the format. (11/19) W1) Added a "presets" pull down box to the People pane of the main menu window, to make it easier for a novice user to generate the queries needed to do membership renewals. By default this will not show up. (11/20) On 11/22, added to the list of "presets", which number 8: LYBUNT - Last Year But Not This Year Givers LGYBF - People Last Giving in Year Before Last Renew1 - People Expiring Month After Next Renew2 - People Expiring Next Month ThisMonth - People Expiring This Month LastMonth - People who Expired Last Month Lapse6 - Expired in last 6 Months Lapse12 - Expired in last Year X1) Added the ability to turn off the feature that keeps bugging you to reduce the donor's "ask amount." (11/19) Y1) Changed the routines throughout ODB to store the full date AND time of all modifications to the data. (11/19) Z1) Incorporated ability to split out the apartment number and an optional 3rd line in the date entry routines (11/20) A2) Allowed user to determine how the results would show in the main menu list: firstname lastname or last, first. (11/18) B2) Added buttons to add payment window to allow user to save and then add a note or edit the people record. (11/18) C2) Implemented Mass Lookup Zip Codes (11/17) D2) Implemented exporting to clipboard (11/17) E2) List of field names in help was updated for the advanced search screen (11/29)) F2) Reintroduced button in donation search results to print a listing of donors or notes on the default printer (11/29) G2) Installer will now use a different name for the ODB icon for installations of ODB not installed in the default location. This name is "Run ODB in Custom Location". Also, the default name for the icon is now "Run ODB 1.0" so you can distinguish this from an icon for an existing 0.9 version. (11/29) Minor Bugs Fixed a) ODB was discarding characters you entered into the phone number fields if they were more than 18 characters. b) Bug in copy emails: If sarajane@aol.com is in a list of emails and jane@aol.com comes later in the list, ODB will suppress jane@aol.com because the duplicate checking is not accurate. c) There were a few fields that were not causing ODB to highlight the "Save" button in the People entry when you modified those fields. d) There were quite a few fields (expired and modified dates, for example) that were not updating the sql query when you changed them. e) On systems without a c: drive, the installer crashes (5/9) f) When you delete a donation, the selected item in the listbox was moving upward; now it stays in the same place (5/11) g) Language when editing old payment was incorrect; should not have said "do you want to add a pmt from 03" (5/11) h) When you print a tax receipt for gifts over $250, the radio button for tax receipt was not getting high- lighted. (5/11) i) ODB was not letting you erase a custom salutation under circumstances (5/12) j) ODB was erasing the zip2 field when you backwards tabbed out of it (5/12) k) ODB would not let you paste international phone numbers into any of the phone fields without truncating them (5/16) l) If your category and subcategory names were long, the subcategory would not show up in a person's payment history. Changed the tab stops and table width to allow more of the subcategory to show. (5/19) m) Widened display of donations (view history) to show more of the category/subcategory text. (6/8) n) Defaults for expiration date and joined date are now "mm/dd/yy" when you create a new record (6/20) o) When you look up a zip code from the web, ODB was not immediately updating the screen (7/11) p) Fixed two 1.0 problems: the user defined field (user1) was not showing up after a conversion. Run the new convert1.0 utility to fix this. The other problem was that SRC code import was not working if you loaded in an import specification to set up an import of a SRC code (7/13) q) Importing of hyphenated names -- this was dropping the hyphen. Changed this to only drop extra quotes. This might cause names with apostrophes (') to break the duplicate checking so this should be tested (7/13) r) Fixed extra redrawing that was taking place when the Main Menu window was resized (7/28) s) Fixed delays in redrawing when opening up a People or Groups screen, by moving some processing to when the window is hidden (7/28) t) Updated the defaults of SRCcodemax and AppealcodeMax, to 8 and 4 respectively (8/24) u) Changed method of selecting SRC codes so that ODB will actually select the item that the user clicks on. (9/1) v) Automatic backups were taking place in some situations right after a new installation, or attaching to a new DB. The intended behavior is to have the backups take place the second time the DB is opened. Corrected 9/21. u) The use of Shift-F10 as an accessibility shortcut was not working for most of the buttons. Fixed, so it now works for all buttons that allow a right-click. (10/26) v) Fix of reply slip printing so that you can use a "PDF" generator to print them. (11/2) w) 'No $ calls' label was showing up all the time when looking at 'Groups' in the main menu (11/1). x) Adjusted the method of getting the desktop directory so it should be more reliable, and not depend on presence of Wscript on the computer. (11/3) y) The method of determining the installation location in the setup wizard was assuming that the user's documents folders in WinXP/2000 were on the C: Drive (11/4) z) Rare crash in check-duplicates when you had quote (") characters in the street name or number is now fixed. Also ODB will now prevent entry of quotes in the street number. (11/4) aa)When ODB creates the batch file 'odb.bat' to enable ODB to be run from the command line, it will now use the long path inside of this file to make it more readable (11/4) bb)Improved function that checks validity of email addresses (10/25) cc)ODB was asking if you wanted to replace the CD information with nothing when the lookup failed; this is disabled for now, as it was confusing (11/4). dd)Donation report choice #3 was not returning the proper results, due to a very minor error. This issue was also fixed in version 0.9.6e (11/7). ee)Fixed small bug in showing search results if one of the Name fields contained a "null" value. (11/10) ff)Fixed problems in pasting phone numbers, and allowed this function to be disabled using a setting named "intlphone" (11/12) gg)Fixed data entry issue where addresses like "10 A Town Court" would not be recognized as sortable, numeric addresses due to the presence of the space after "10". Now "10 A" will be recognized and sorted as coming before "10 B" or "10B". hh)Fixed problem where save dialog for extra backup would show up in the top left hand corner of ODB. (11/13) ii)Fixed problem where focus was not set when you right- clicked in the "Choices" window. jj)Add Payment screen has an unwanted close box on it (11/14) kk)Fixed problem where the country field was not included when addresses were copied from the main menu. (11/15) ll)Fixed problem where ODB would flag certain international addresses as incomplete, when they obviously were not. (11/15) mm)Fixed problem where exporting data to the clipboard was no longer working in 1.0. (11/15) nn)Fixed problem where VID field in advanced search screen would be used for both people and Groups searches. (11/15) oo)Fixed problem in detail printing where records would run into each other. (11/12) pp)Added error handling in case of the records in an open result set is deleted, to gracefully deal with the situation. (11/19) qq)Removed several queries from the installer as they are not ready to be used yet. (11/20) rr)Restored use of "biglist" feature which had not been tested in version 1.0 yet. (11/20) ss)Improved display of fractional dollar amounts, which was showing just once decimal place in some instances. (11/20) tt)Added inded to Last name field in database to improve query performance over slower networks. (11/20) uu)Fixed bug where ODB would conflate the "group VID" field search string with the search string for the individual VID field. (11/20) vv)Fixed crash in "mass set gift dates" (11/19) ww)Fixed handling of Canada, UK, and some other internationally formatted dates. (11/18) yy)Corrected some problems in new features: the 'Find At Address' right click option on Advanced Search button was not filling in the proper search fields. The "add with last name from search box" function did not like hyphenated names or names with an apostophe. The Pledge Search screen did not clear out properly and the radio buttons did not change the query. The import screen would ignore the table name from the new import specification format. One of the fields in the report definitions table did not have zero length enabled. Spurious "you have no report categories defined" error. New payment import combo box (appealcodes) not loading at all. (11/22) zz)Corrected null values in the sample database that could cause ODB to report errors and in a couple of cases get into an infinite loop. (11/22) a1)NSIS installer was appending "oc" to a custom directory that you chose, if it was not c:\program files\oc (11/29( b1)Installer may look in wrong place for templates if there is a prior installation (11/29) c1)Installer should not use default to use data from existing installation if that was pre-1.0 (11/29) Database Changes a) VID field in groups table is renamed "OID" DONE b) Name of the appealinfo field in the donations table is renamed to "appealcode". It is now limited to 8 characters. DONE c) The phone number fields in people table must all have 20 characters, including FAx number. DONE d) New field in SRC code table, called "inactive" to be used for disabling unused SRC codes DONE e) New table Appealcodes, similar to SRCcodes in its structure, but used to store donations and pledge codes DONE f) New fields in donation table for check number, donation comment DONE g) Four new fields in the People table: a second email address and three check boxes that determine how that second email address is to be used: "Email2listservs" "Email2copyemail" "Email2extracopy" DONE h) the field "updatedby" was added to the people, groups, donations, and notes and pledges table so that we can track who the last person to change something was. DONE j) In the "donations" table, the UserID field renamed PeopleID k) Added a field PledgeID to the donations table to indicate a donation that fulfills a pledge. DONE l) Field added to donations, people, and groups tables: Updatedby and Enteredby. Also added to donations table was the field "Updated", so you know when important data changed. DONE m) Changes in settings formats and categories: Code categories renamed. Geog -> Geogcat, Ledger -> Category, Proj -> Projtype, and finally Indtype -> Type. DONE o) Enlarged the donation table fields Category and Subcategory. Now these fields will allow 2 characters instead of one. DONE p) Added "Apt" field to the People table for future use, apt stands for Apartment. DONE q) Fixed problems with the conversion utility, mainly that it often crashed while trying to extend the size of the codecat field in the codes table, and that it was failing to change the setting names for the user defined field #1. The names are changed to "user1fieldname" and "user1fieldproperties". (7/13) DONE r) Fixed additional problem in conversion utility, in that it was failing to make changes to the report definitions table if that table already existed. (8/2?) DONE s) Renamed lastgave field in People table to lastgiftdt, to be compatible with the 0.9.9 builds, and easier to understand. Added Lastnongift and Lastnongiftdt for future use. (8/17) DONE t) Added the "Class" field to the People table. (8/17) DONE u) Added a 'NationalID' field to the People table for integration with other, "master copy" databases (8/17) DONE v) Added a 'Skype' field to hold the user's Skype ID (8/24) DONE w) Revamped the "settings" table completely (the settings table will be renamed oldsettings and a new settings table will take its place...) (9/27) DONE x) New table Reportdefs, structure finalized on 10/21, to store definitions of external reports which can be implemented using Access, Crystal Reports 4.6, Open Office. y) New tables Notes and Pledges, to store notes, pledges, and reminders. Structure pretty much finalized in early October 2005. z) Added a Line3 field, which may be available in early versions of 1.0. (10/24/05) Usability Enhancements a) In ODB Templates, the names for the various kinds of codes (type, progtype, geogcat, category, etc.) now is the same as the field name used to store that code. Now all templates will have 12 characters to store the code category, rather than 8 characters. b) It is no longer necessary to "enable code changes" to turn on "extended import." All import options are available all the time from the pull down menu in the Import screen. (1/18) c) The save button is now highlighted when changes are made to a text box with greater precision than before (3/9) d) The feature to add a record using the text that was entered previously in the search box was extended. Now it will auto-enter both first and last name, if the user searched on these. (3/10) e) Major UI Upgrade to Select Records Screen, showing all results in a "tabbed" area and incorporating tabs in the people search area so that additional fields can be displayed. (4/29) f) ODB will now automatically open and close all forms so that you no longer have to do this manually in order to properly use the "save language file" feature. (5/6) g) In the Setup wizard, ODB will now refresh the "drive" box. This is useful if you map a network drive during the install process so that it will show up as one of the locations for creating a new database. h) Improved interface for checking for new version of ODB by adding a small program testconnection.exe which can reliable detect the presence of an Internet connection. (5/7) i) Improved interface for downloading a new zip code file (5/7) Debugged this interface on 12/7/05. j) Improved interface for downloading the updater, and allowing user to convert an old ODB database (5/7) k) Improved performance redrawing the main listbox in the main menu area when you resize it. Basically, we now use tab stops to position the text, which is more efficient than using spaces (and allows variable width text in the future) 5/8. Further improved this, as the resize was happening twice (7/13). l) Expanded the size of mailcode and Geographic area text boxes so that you can fully read the choices (5/9) m) Improved dialog boxes for the backup system (5/10) n) Improved prompts and dialogs for situation where an ODB database is missing (5/10) o) Allowed user to customize the name of their ODB database to something other than odbdata.odb (5/10) p) Increased text size in all 350 message boxes that ODB displays to the user. (5/9) q) Improved the usability of queries, by allowing date ranges to be entered as two separate dates (5/9) r) Improved usability issue of custom sql by having ODB count numbers of left and right parentheses, and warn you (upon exiting the field) when they don't match. (5/10) s) General overhaul of language and formatting on the setup screens. (5/10) t) Improved prompts for backup screen (6/8). u) Got rid of extra leading zero in display of donation date, and made the software automatically add missing zero in the donation date user entered. (7/5) v) When importing and exporting records using the basic default fields, the number of fields and the field order is now the same, making it easier in some situations where you have two ODB databases and you want to pass info from one to the other. (7/14) w) Improved prompts when the district information in the lookup file does not match the information in a person's record upon opening it, and made the behavior of highlighting the cmdSave button consistent. x) When the user tries to open an older version ODB database, ODB will now use the conversion program it already has in the "converters" folder, rather than trying to download a converter. This is a lot friendlier. (9/28) y) The caption on the top of the Window for automated backups was confusing, so it was improved (10/21) z) Improved usability of the Mailcodes, by changing the wording of the message box when you update the address, and the wording of the default option. (10/27) aa)ODB now asks you if you want to restart after you make changes to settings (10/28) bb) Implemented "strike-thru" printing so that if you print laser labels or reply slips or envelopes for addresses that are expired, those addresses will be crossed out. (11/2) cc) Added warning messages if the group of records you are about to print to labels, or to envelopes, or to reply slips contains invalid addreses. (11/2) dd) Added visual indication in the Select Records window of the presence of an active "custom query". The visual indication is the use of two asterisk characters before and after the words "View Query" (11/2) ee) Added visual indication in the Select Records window of the presence of data within the various "people" and "groups" tabs (11/2) ff) Added visual indication in the People Entry window of the presence of data within the various tabs (11/2) gg) Modified restriction, to allow notetypes to be either 1 or 2 characters (11/8) hh) Additional visual presence cue (asterisks) to indicate presence of data within the various history tabs, if "shownotes" is enabled (11/10) ii) Navigation improvement, in that View history buttons will now go to the first tab that has "stuff in it" (11/10) jj) Modification to the button generation code, so that button text can be larger, and can be more than one word on a button (implemented this to improve Setup Wizard text) (11/10) kk) Language on right click menu for import/export button needed improvement. First, the wording "all possible fields" was replaced by "extended fields". Second, the word "with" was missing from the first menu item, a pretty obvious omission (11/11). ll) Added visual indication (pull down menu) so that when you export the clipboard, it shows that this is what you are doing. (11/11)) mm) ODB was saving backups of data under the name odbdata.odb in all cases (followed by the month). Changes this to save backups with the actual name of the DB followed by the month. (fixed in aug?) nn) Fixed problem with repeated requests for a password when you printed "detailed info" (11/11) oo) Fixed issue with auto-creation of queries folder where this would confuse the users, on load and save queries. (11/12) pp) Much faster display of search results in main window, thus the resultlimit default will now be 5000 records, not 1500, and it should be much faster even with 5K records. (11/13) qq) Change in wording: "demo database" is now consistently called "Sample Database" throughout (11/13) rr) Dropdown menus on combo boxes now will show their full contents (no more cut off text, or the need for scrolling, up to 16 menu items) (11/14) ss) Eliminating the startup popup dialog box asking about opening up the user manual (integrated this into the Wizard) (11/15) tt) Darkened text on boxes that don't allow user input, to increase usability. (11/17) uu) Improved display speed in main menu. (11/18) vv) Reduced flicker on redrawing when windows are closed. (11/18) ww) Made the auto-creation of import specification folder behave just like the queries folders now behave. (11/22) xx) The test label on dot matrix printers would not actually feed out the printer on its own; you would need to do a manual "form feed", some text reminding the user to do this was added to the message box that appears after they print. (11/22) yy) Implemented progress messages to let user know the status of their ODB printing jobs in the queue. (11/25) zz) Improved messages you get when there is an issue doing a zip code lookup (12/5) a1) Added visual indication to show when a record has notes or pledges attached to it. Also added the number of notes/ pledges/payments to the drop down menu in the main menu screen for the View History button. (12/5) b1) Improved the import screen by allowing a user to cancel out of a long import when they get the message about ODB finding five consecutive duplicates (12/7) To Do a) Finish redesign of "settings" area, already 70% done, and add buttons to "save", "apply changes", and Cancel. 8 hours work, including testing. Also, add a few settings for the report generator to be saved in the local registry. May attempt to make use of the Tab control for settings, although it is a boring grey color. This is more than a day's work -- 5 hours coding, 5 hrs testing. Includes work to modify interface for language settings. b) More testing on new data entry screen for People entry, just for situations where address is long plus po boxes. c) Add reports to go along with the new feature allowing ODB to be linked with a report engine. Steve Wishengrad has helped with this modification; it allows you to link with files in Open Office Writer, Access (97/2000/xp), or Crystal Reports 4.6. Works, but VOLUNTEERS are needed to create more reports d) update user guide, and create rough draft for new features Update the "get info box" within ODB. (Estimate 20 hours total, including volunteer help). tasks include: - better document hiding of fields - new section on using notes and reminders - new section on using pledges - new section on setting up reports - better documentation of membercategories/giftcategories - better documentation on how one uses source/src codes - revamping of the basic ODB guide to reflect the significant new features, but not all details e) Mantis is down to about 4 or 5 issues, with just one requiring any significant work. this is very good. OPTIONAL (probably push back to 1.1) a) implement asynchronous download for zip code files, etc. b) additional integration with online systems like email merging, CivicSpace data, ical, email list software, list enhancement, and donation processing systems. This is partly implemented, so futher work may wait until 1.1. Others can help with this. c) An assist with importing, so that ODB an take 3 address lines and attempt to trim them down to two lines, or something like that. d) Assistance with importing list enhanced data. e) Possibly add field to Ledger and Appeal tables to allow a code to be made inactive in the future. Maybe call it "inactivecategories" and "inactivesubcategories" f) Possibly add a field to SRCcodes table to be a future category for the SRC codes so that you can have the codes in user-defined categories. g) Additional improvements to the "Add Pledge" screen to support multi-year pledges. ODB Version 0.9.7 Release Notes (February 9, 2006) Version 0.9.7 is the 1st release of ODB in 2006. It is a small maintenance release aimed at existing ODB users. New Features a) Links to OC web sites were updated to use www.organizersdb.org and www.organizerscollaborative.org, now that we are about to retire www.organizenow.net. The 'Check for New Version' feature was also modified, to use the organizersdb.org web site for future upgrades, and to retrieve zip code files from the new site as well. Major Bug Fixed a) ODB was automatically doing backups even if you indicated in the setup wizard that you did not want them (11/15/05). Minor Bugs Fixed a) In the Select Records area, in Groups mode, you cannot sort a list of results by "Type." (1/4/06) b) ODB was allowing you to do a context search on SRC code even if the SRC code was "None." (12/2/05) c) The add payment screen and setup wizard had close boxes on them. (11/16/05) d) The third donation report choice, "Payments by Name", was not working at all, as it was returning a list of donors instead of a list of payments. (11/7/05) e) ODB was not warning the user that they needed to upgrade their database format using the 0.9.6 conversion program, in certain instances (1/23/05). f) ODB was not downloading the zip code file to the location that you chose; it was downloading the file to the location you did not choose (2/9/05). ODB Version 0.9.6e Release Notes (September 28, 2005, re-released on October 21, 2005) Version 0.9.6e is the 5th release of ODB in 2005. It provides small fixes discovered since the previous release. An upgrade is strongly recommended if you want to use the salutation feature! Thanks especially to Ann Eldridge Malone for her feedback on this. Special Update a) The USPS zip code lookup method was updated and improved, because of a change in the USPS web site (10/21) Minor Bugs Fixed a) Characters entered into the title combo box were not enabling the CmdSave button. (7/13) b) ODB was letting you enter more characters into the title combo box than the size of the field, and these chars were lost (7/13) c) If the voter registration field does not exist ODB will crash on startup. A backward compatibility issue. Fixed 7/19. d) The label to the "country" field was pushed over. Fixed 7/28. e) Fixed incorrect email address for bug reporting, changed bug reporting to use the Mantis web site (7/28). f) More Salutation Fixes (8/17) - the salutation field was not cleared out, allowing salutations from previous records to be saved to new records that are entered without a title - the Salutation logic for keeping a custom salutation when the user resets the "title" combo box to nothing was incorrect, so this was not working at all. g) Fixed right-click on SRC code bug. ODB was allowing you to change SRC codes even if you had not enabled code changes. (9/1) h) ODB was allowing the user to set the user defined field name to a value containing spaces or punctuation characters, which should have been illegal (9/7) i) When importing data, accented spanish characters were removed from the first and last name (9/28) Major Issue Fixed a) On really old ODB databases, ODB could try to use the salutation field even if had an ODB database that did not have the salutation field. This would yield an error "Item not found in collection" and ODB would quit (7/13) ODB Version 0.9.6d Release Notes (June 28, 2005) Version 0.9.6d is the 4th release of ODB in 2005 and provides small fixes and usability improvements suggested by users of the ODB software. An upgrade is strongly recommended, particularly if you want to use the salutation feature! New Feature a) By right-clicking on the Search button, you can toggle several new settings to make ODB automatically click various buttons (to open screens) after a single record is found in a search (5/9) Minor Fixes a) Huge efficiency improvement in redrawing the Main menu list of search results (5/9) b) Corrected a bug in the setup wizard preventing installation on systems without a c: drive (5/9) c) Easier to see the SRC code button in Show Details mode in the main menu; you don't have to make the window as wide. Also, the SRC code button was never showing up when you first ran ODB (5/9). d) Right-click search on SRC codes was returning duplicates, when finding people sharing the same SRC codes (5/10) e) The Salutation Field was not cleared, so if you clicked cancel and then clicked on new record, you might see the leftover salutation from the previous records. (6/23) f) Potential expiration date logic problem fixed, which could occur if you clicked the Cancel button in the dialogue boxes that ask about the expiration date and display three buttons (yes, no, Cancel). (6/24) g) Eliminated spurious "thank you note missing" messsages that appeared even when the thankyoucheckbox feature in the AddGift window was off. (5/13) Usability Enhancements a) Improved the process by which ODB chains to the conversion program when opening an old database, so that ODB properly quit and permit the installer to overwrite the old ODB.exe file. Thanks to Ethan Winn for suggesting this change (6/23). b) Added an option to reset the database when ODB tells you that your database file is from an older version. Also, protected this with a password so it is not quite so easy for a novice user to "detach" the current database just by opening up ODB on a client machine when the server machine is not on. (6/24) Major Fixes a) ODB was not letting you erase a custom salutation and set it to nothing, so that the informal first name would be used (5/12) b) ODB was not exporting anything for salutation at all when the salutation field was blank. Instead ODB will now export the first name. (6/23) c) ODB was letting you delete a person even if they were linked to by a Group, without any warning. Then ODB would quit with the error "no current record" when you opened the group. Thanks to Kathy Gannett for noticing this. (6/22) Version 0.9.6c contains minor fixes in ODB Released: April 25, 2005 Minor Issues Fixed a) logic to adjust askamount upward and downward was not correct b) text was missing to the left of the sort order buttons after a donation search, this text reads "Sorted by:" c) Ms. appeared twice in pull down menu when Title feature was enabled. d) When you had a carriage return in the clipboard as the first character, this data would appear in the zip code field upon editing an existing record, instead of the correct data. This is a major issue but occurred very rarely. e) Duplicate testing for entering new data improved, so that ODB will no longer issue spurious duplicate warnings when you add a hyphen to a last name. Also the dupe checking will be better at testing for duplicates in some situations, like during a clone operation. f) Missing redraw of the code choices window, when you used the "Archive Code" feature in ODB to move a code from the issues, activies, or constituency area to a "SRC" code. g) It was difficult to use the line2 feature in "Select Records" on organizations with names like "National Association of ..." because not enough characters were allowed. Characters allowed increased from 14 to 25. Documentation note: when you use the new feature to archive or un-archive a code, then you return to the main menu, the preview pane is not refreshed, and may not show any new code values that were just added to the currently selected record as part of your mass update operation. Usability Enhancement a) Clearer instructions for the situation where ODB detects that you need to run the latest updater to your database to add new fields that are needed for 0.9.6b. Major Issue Fixed a) When you used the new 0.9.6 feature to move a SRC code to the "activities" or "issues" or "constituency" area, and you merged with an existing code, ODB would put the same activity code in a second time if it already existed, i.e. you might see "C1C3C3" which should never happen. Version 0.9.6b contains a very small number of bug fixes: there was one new bug introduced by 0.9.6a which is the reason for this release. Released: January 24, 2005 New Feature a) If a donor has given larger amounts and then gives smaller amounts, ODB will now prompt you to ask if their "askamount" should be adjusted downward. Typically this is done if a donor become unemployed for a while, and they are unable to give at their previous level (1/19). Minor Issues Fixed a) Redid the logic for determining how to assign the variables "lastgave" and "lastgift". This is a cleaner implementation, and it means that if you have "gift categories" assigned the lastgave and lastgift fields will be recalculated looking at the entire donation history, without regard to the previous value of "lastgave" or "lastgift." If a donor has non-donation payments they will still be ignored in determining how to store the person's last gift and last gift date properties. (1/19) b) ODB was reporting that a person "Never Gave" if they had given money, and if that person's gift(s) were in non member categories, therefore they were not a member. (1/19) Major Bug Fixed a) Corrected a problem with 0.9.6a, where date ranges in a donation search were broken (the query generated would look for dates greater the first date AND greater than the second date). 0.9.6 worked fine and we restored the proper behavior. (1/24) Version 0.9.6a fixes some problems that were still in early 0.9.6 versions plus a few more issues. Important: 0.9.6 contained a bug so that when you created a new database it immediately gave you a warning that you needed to upgrade. This is fixed in 0.9.6a. Released: January 11, 2005 New Features a) ODB will encourage you to run the conversion program convert096.exe, and doing so will add all kinds of new settings. The only setting new to 0.9.6 is called thankyoudateshift. If you set this to "on" then the date of the thank you note will be shifted to the right. Other settings added were documented in prior releast notes. b) Password input boxes now should be "masked", that is, they will not show the letters you type into them. Minor Issues Fixed a) Fixed problem where ODB would quit if you pasted long numbers without spaces into the street number box (1/11) b) Changed ODB so that it will use the lowercase "id" as the field name instead of "ID" when generating donation reports. This gets around an obscure microsoft bug: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626 in which excel cannot open CSV files if the first two characters are uppercase "ID". Major Bugs Fixed a) In recent versions of ODB, printing labels or envelopes from the "groups" area was not working. Thanks to Mark Oswood for noticing this and reporting it. (1/6) b) Fixed problem where ODB would quit if you pressed enter after entering a partial date in the Select Records area. (1/11) Version 0.9.6 is a release to ODB with one very significant addition, the incorporation of a salutation field. This release also features some important fixes to small bugs found by ODB users. The fixes relate to mailings, expiration dates, and thank you notes. If you are using ODB for membership management an update is advised because we noticed that editing a donation in 0.9.5b or earlier could advance an expiration date if you were not very careful. Note that the salutation field addition changes the layout of the People window slightly. Released: December 21, 2004. Updated on December 24, 2004. One more update on Jan. 6, 2005. Note: An 0.9.6 converter was released on 12/22/04 and must be used to take advantage of the salutation feature. This is a cumulative converter. Note if you ran the 0.9.5b converter available between 12/7 and 12/22 you might find that the salutation field will be pre-filled with a "0" character. We will help you remove this for free if this is the case; the new converter does not have this problem. Issues addressed are: - import and export could be interrupted (other buttons still active) - Title not printed on mailing labels - Long names on mailing labels truncated unnecessarily - "Auto Salutation" feature was printing suffixes - Added long-awaited salutation field. You can customize it and it should show up in thank you printing, and exporting (all fields). New Features a) ODB will now include "lastgift" and "lastgave" field even for donation reports that report summary info on donors. (12/8) Also, ODB will include the donors email address, to facilitate online solicitation (12/21). b) ODB did not have a salutation field. We reorganized the screen to add a saluation field; this will snow up only when the "title" feature is on and when a a person's title is not empty (12/6). When the Title is first filled in, either from the menu or from the keyboard, the salutation field will be filled in with "title lastname". You can modify it to whatever you would like (i.e. "Fluffy"). Please note that you must run the new ODB 0.9.5b conversion utility in order to add the salutation field, this utility was updated on 12/6/04. DL link http://organizerscollaborative.org/0.9/convert095b.exe Further details on how this works: For usability, the saluation field is hidden until you enable the "Showtitle" option, and until you select a title from the menu. Once you have entered a salutation, the custom salutation will remain visible even if you reset the "Title" to blank. Thus if salutations were imported into ODB they should show up. None of the salutation functionality appears unless the database is updated to include the "salutation" field (see next item) (12/6) c) Updated the utility convert095b.exe to add a 'salutation' field to existing ODB databases (12/7). Note that the initial converter would fill the salutation field with zeroes. We fixed this issue on 12/22/04. Email us if you need to figure out how to get rid of the zeroes after you ran the flawed converter. d) On 12/24/04 we updated the user manual; there are some significant revisions including documentation of new features. e) Donation import was setting the "entered" date for all donations to be the same as the donation date. This may not be what someone wants so we added a checkbox to allow you to choose today's date instead (12/24). f) Added donation import feature to allow you to set the same appealcode (appealinfo field) for each imported donation. Shows up only if the "showappealinfo" option is enabled (12/24). Minor fixes a) ODB was failing to print the "title" on mailing labels, even though this was working ok on envelopes. Thanks to Ann Eldridge Malone for alerting us to this (12/2). b) When printing labels, ODB was truncating more information than needed... reducing everything to 35 characters in many cases. It will no longer reduce things to 35 characters. Also we changed the laser label printing to allow 48 characters on long address labels, however smaller labels are still limited to 37 chars. (12/6) c) When generating the name for a salutation, ODB was appending the suffix if it existed. This was not necessary so it was removed. (12/6) d) When printing standard labels 30 per sheet, columns 2 and 3 often were shifted left a hair. Fixed this. (12/6) e) Allowed the '&' character to be used when searching from the main menu. (12/7) f) Fixed the maximum # characters allowed in the first name field; it should have been 20. (12/7) g) Fixed the maximum # of characters allowed in the email field; it should have been 70. (12/7) h) Donation reports in comma separated format will now default to a ".csv" instead of ".txt" extension so that they can be directly opened into Excel. (12/8) i) The Export feature should have exported a " character as two quotes ("") for compatibility with CSV import into Excel. This is now fixed (12/12), but it is only fixed for the comments field. It can still be an issue with the name, address, city, and email fields, so the workaround is to remove the " character from these fields. j) ODB will by default print all thank you notes with the date left justified. There is now a new setting in ODB, "thankyoudateshift" which can be set to true to restore the original behaviour. If you need this let us know and we will send you a converter which is needed to enable this setting. (12/21) k) We fixed a previously unreported bug, where ODB would generate a false warning about dot matrix printing when you tried to print a "tax receipt" after entering a donation of over $250. (12/22) l) Fixed very minor, annoying glitch in that checking the box 'first name and last name are combined' and then unchecking it would reverse the order of the 'last' and 'first' name fields in field list (12/24). Major bugs fixed a) ODB's export feature was allowing you to click on various things during the export, and that could result in not fully exporting all the chosen records. Similar issues with ODB's import feature. (12/2) Note: this change broke the "Donation Import" feature of ODB. We noticed this on 12/24 and fixed it, making a small improvement to donation import in the process. b) When you edited an existing donation, ODB was advancing the expiration date. Now ODB will no longer do this. However, ODB will still try to automatically adjust the "lastgift", "lastgave", "joined", and "askamount" fields based on modifications to dates of donations. (12/21) ####### ODB Future Plans, and call for help ######### A. 0.9.6 is the last 0.9.x series release. The next release will be our "1.0" version. We are planning to release ODB 1.0 RC1 just after Thanksgiving, after we have tested it with a few existing ?ODB clients. 1.0 offers major improvements in most areas of ODB; the goal was to have a more polished application without any obvious omissions. B. We also have an 0.9.9 version that includes a more advanced capability of linking people and organizations. We want to integrate this into ODB eventually, but it makes sense to do more revamping to the 1.0 code before we do so. C. There will likely be a series of 1.0.x releases early in '06. D. At the same time, we want to create a new development version, 1.1, which should have: - a) improved organization of source code - b) full internationalization using "potext" compatible files, and also make ODB easier to use managing international phone #s. - c) improved integration with Internet applications - d) list enhancement capability upgrades - e) look into problems when you feed incorrect data to the import, i.e. feed list of names into donation import - f other minor improvements. This 1.1 version is intended to apply all the of the changes to ODB to make it much easier to port to another development environment (such as RealBasic, which runs on MacOS/Linux as well as Windows), and comes with Mysql and Unicode support also. We could also produce an even more fully open source version of ODB in the future, provided a lead developer or funder emerges who is willing to contribute about 4 person-months of developer time to the project necessary to get that off the ground. If you are interested in helping, please email: odb2006oc-tech.org Prior Release History October 27, 2004 0.9.5b released (minor release) September 29, 2004 0.9.5a released (major maintenance release) May 26, 2004 0.9.5 released (major release) December 15, 2003 0.9.4a released (minor release) November 18, 2003 0.9.4 released (major maintenance release) Sept. 17, 2003 0.9.3b released (maintenance release) July 22, 2003 0.9.3a released (maintenance release) May 19, 2003 0.9.3 released (major new release) April 17, 2003 0.9.2a released (major new release) March 4, 2003 0.9.1 released (many bug fixes) February 3, 2003 0.9.0 released (maintenance release) Jan. 18, 2003 0.9 released (major new features) August 30, 2002 0.8.9a released (mostly fixes) July 17, 2002 0.8.9 released (new features) June 26, 2002 0.8.8d released (major maintenance release) March 7, 2002 0.8.8 released (first public release) February 19, 2002 0.8.7d released (usability improvements) January 29, 2002 0.8.7b released (customizability increased) November 28, 2001 0.8.6 released (new features, bug fixes) August 2, 2001 0.8.5 released (small number of bug fixes) June 22, 2001 0.8.4d released (major release) April 2001 0.8.1 released (first release outside of OC) March 2001 0.7.0 first demo of ODB, at OC Conference October 1999 0.5.0 OC began using ODB internally Known Issues Please see the bug tracking system for a few additional items we are working on. We are actively looking for developers to help us with these! 1) People whose computers have a different version of "DAO 3.5" from the one shipped with ODB might have trouble starting ODB for the first time [this problem is rare, and it can be resolved using the procedures on the Installation/Database Driver page]. 2) The query engine is not yet set up to do a query that involves a combination of two or more of the biglist, srclink and donations tables. (This issue will be addressed in 1.5.) 3) ODB does not include a digital signature with the installer. ############################################################### LONGSTANDING PROBLEMS, FIXED IN 0.9.6 or 1.0 1) The user manual will open in Wordpad and ignore much of the formatting even on some systems that should be set up to read it, with all "RTF" formatting. We resolved this by moving the user manual to a "PDF" file in late 2004. 2) ODB should detect the presence/absence of the Internet more quickly, so that you don't have to wait 40 seconds for a timeout error message. We resolved this in May of 2005 by writing a 12K utility in Visual Basic that is able to test the presence of the Internet and save this state in a text file in the Windows temporary directory. To be released in the fall. 3) The lastgift date and amount might not be properly set if you have two or more donations for someone on a given day and you have deleted or recategorized some of the gifts. 4) The zip code file should now expand properly on Win XP/2000, using version 1.0. Questions? Please send an email to oc2005 oc-tech.org.