Hi folks,
Do you have naming rules for your LEO (Lists/Extractions/Output Sets)? Wordly emails and pages? Scheduled reports?
If you do what are they and how are you enforcing these?
Enquiring minds need to know.
For Lists and Extractions, we put A, E, or M at the start (analysis, email, mail) to indicate what the list is being used for. It makes it easier to find them when going through the list.
we're in a consortium, so definitely. most things start with org_initials of user, so mine would be "ack_eo list name"
Having rules for lists makes sense to me since it will make selecting a list from a dropdown (on a report parameter for instance) easier. I'm not sure if it makes a difference for scheduled reports.
I always make sure to include the fiscal year if applicable(i.e. FY23) in the title of every list so that change of fiscal year I can run a simple SQL statement to inactivate all lists with the previous fiscal year in it (i.e. LIKE “%FY23%”)
We've used "Dept_CreatorInitials_descriptoin" since we went live in 2008, e.g. "IS_CJ_", followed by "NCOA", or "ro" (for rolllover), etc.. LIsts that begin "WF" refer to WordFly.
We do similar to Anne. S (school), B (Box office), M (Marketing), D (Development)
For extractions we start with the year/month/day so that it's easier to find them in the dropdown when importing to a new extraction. Then department+fiscal year, then description. So it looks like 23.02.09 MKT23 Big show sales email. MKT is marketing, DEV is development, DS is drama school, GEN is used for newletters and other general comms.
Our list manager and outputs naming is a bit more wild wild west.
With Lists we have a rule that people put their initials at the front of the list, although between control grouping and list categories, and the general need of the users to name their lists so that their function is clear for their own purposes those are not the most problematic to sort. Likewise for Output Sets. Not a lot of people do Scheduled Reports, so again, Control Grouping and filters make those easy enough to navigate, even with three orgs in our Consortium.
Naming Conventions and generally sorting and organizing data has become a big concern of my since we expanded into a consortium. I had hope that Tessitura Consulting would be able to give us some kind of checklist or recommendation, but they cannot. I've been building a document of different data items to assess whether they need control grouping, whether they should be partially or wholly shared by consortium members or whether we need naming conventions (a surprising amount of stuff is not control grouped, or is control grouped but still displayed to users regardless of control group in various contexts).
I suspect usage cases do very a bit, but I do thing a properly comprehensive document (mine is still nowhere close) should be possible. You know, "This is Control Groupable, this is not, this can be organized with Categories/Types/Groups, you should use naming conventions with these in order to split/sort/describe them, in a consortium be sure to" and so on.
Hi Heath,
We use a combination of both a list naming convention of department and year (so Development lists would be DEV23..., etc) but also list folders that relate to functionality (so lists used for Prospect2 data syncs are in a P2 folder).
I've always thought it'd be GREAT to have a list name of longer than 30 characters and also a notes/description field.
Martin
My thought is that some of this (having to have naming conventions for lists) is based on constraints from Tessitura as it was many years ago. (I started using Tessitura in 2004.) The real issue is how much do you share lists between users? If you don't share them, then "most of the time" (won't guarantee all because I haven't checked each one), when there is a report parameter for a list, it will show you YOUR lists first. This is accomplished by having this in the "order by clause" part of the parameter setup: CASE WHEN created_by = dbo.fs_user() then 0 ELSE 1 END, list_desc
If you have access to edit report setup, you can see this for both lists and output sets in the "Execute an Output" set report.
And the other part of this is if you click on the chicklet for the list parameter, it will open up the list of lists screen, with the "my lists only" checkbox selected as a default. (If anyone knows how to change this default, I'm all ears.)
I'm considering having naming conventions mostly so people don't forget what they created the list for (and we can both tell if they can be inactivated/deleted). The other option is to use an approach like the one Katie Lachance-Duffy has created to clean up old lists. Here's a link to that discussion: https://community.tessituranetwork.com/topical_groups/database-managers-tessitura-community/f/discussions/31892/protocols-for-list-extractions-output-sets/83311#83311