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Very Cool...Big Kev...Ernie in Arizona

Added status date to view (if available):

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I made some changes to the form used to add new vehicles to Registry.

Once a Year/Series/Model is selected, it will now auto-fill some of the data on the form:

1) Expected Vehicle Number format with the Body Number pre-inserted. Hopefully, for those not familiar with the numbering, this will help them understand what number we are looking for here.

2) Engine (this will get prefilled with the Factory engine for the selected model. It of course can be changed.

3) Engine Serial format will show what the format looks like and the expected serial number range based on the selected model. Hopefully, this will help to make sure the right number/format is entered.

4) Lastly, the Paint Code field is now a drop-down list, so for any years that have Paint "Scheme" codes, this will show them in a list that can be selected.

All of this is to help standardize the information being added, which then helps with the automated parsing later.

I've been trying to clean up the data as before everything was kind of free-form in the way data was being entered and that caused a headache in being able to correlate data later on.

Hopefully, with this bit of guidance, it will help when folks when new entries are added to the Registry.

This only applies to new Entries. The Change Entry form still allows for complete editing and changes.

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Continuing with Registry enhancements, I have gone through the Registry and normalized where possible items like Model Body Number to match what is expected, and on the very early Pre-Series cars, which have no Model Body numbers, I had to create ones so the Database could differentiate the different models from one another. As part of that, the Model Chassis number is now also part of the Registry entry. I also made the Owner name editable, so if adding a car, that you don't own based on historical information, the owner of the car at that time can be entered, rather than just blindly using the forum user who added it. I also added a new field that can be used from the Briggs Body Numbers or Frame Numbers or any other number that is unique to the vehicle.

I also went through and added the Custom Bodies cars that were in the registry to the Model Info DB and most of the model numbers for the Commerical Chasssis's. So users can now select those cars when adding to the Registry. If a model is missing, please let me know so it can be added.

With all that in place and standardized, I can now have the website do some dynamic data mining.

There is now a new option on the Registry page for "View Statistics".

This will show you a statistical breakdown of the vehicles in the Registry by Year / Series / Model Chassis / Model Body Number. It shows the number of vehicles of each type registered, the percentage of that vehicle registry broken down by its relevancy to Model Chassis, and total Production. This information is all dynamic. So as cars get added, all the percentages get updated in real-time.


Enjoy!

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Great addition. I was looking for something like this years ago (dynamic totals by year/Series and body type), but not sure if the software would have supported such a thing back then.

Looking ahead, I suspect there could be potential for additional statics if we can collect enough info from owners.

BH, thanks, and per your suggestion, I looked at the code and made some changes to verify that the numbers and calculations are based on "Unique" vehicles, and not total entries. As, a single vehicle, could have multiple entries as it changes hands.

Obviously, vehicles with missing Vehicle Numbers will be treated as unique vehicles since there is no way to correlate anything differently.

The totals on the Stats page and the top of the main Registry page should now reflect both Unique Vehicles and Total Entries.

Leveraging the info in the Registry, now when a Vehicle is looked at in the Model Info pages, it will now show how many (unique) Vehicles of that Model Body are registered, and clicking on that link will take you to the Registry and displaying matching vehicles.

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Good Morning Big Kev and everyone else. It seems to me it would be really interesting if a given car could show all the owners, over time, that have had the car registered on our site. It seems to me that Mel's 1950 Packard has had at least three owners on this site...such a history would be really interesting and I think that new owners might check in with prior owners to let them know how their old car is doing. We purchased Miss Purdence from a wholesaler, but he gave us the old registration...I found the fellow, in Grand Island, Nebraska, and called him...his first comment was 'Well I'll be damned' we had a nice conversation. I asked him why he sold the car and he said 'My doctor told me I was going to die...and then I did not!' Go figure! Ernie in Arizona

It currently can in a couple of different ways. If someone searchs by VN, it would show all the entires that match.

Also, when viewing the list, any entires that share the same VN are shown linked together in the table views.

-Kev

Fixed issue with the Search on the Factory Service Index not always working correctly. Also it now searches the Application field as well.