Preserving Your Revisions and Additions to the CFS/FM Database

Preserving Your Revisions and Additions
to the CFS/FM Database

Several users have raised the question as to how to retain their own citations and revisions when downloading a newly revised edition of CFSFMNA.MDB or CFSFMNA.TXT and whether I make available a "quarterly update". I constantly tweak the references in the CFS database, so some articles may be "old" yet have a revised description or otherwise be corrected. Therefore, it is almost impossible to make a series of files that contain only the "new" articles. This isn't a problem for people who don't make additions or revisions themselves-- they can just download the revised file periodically. But If you are actively modifying entries or adding citations of your own that you want to retain, there is not an easy solution to offer to this common "synchronization" problem. You could, however, do the following (requires some Access skills not fully preprogrammed):

Add a unique character sequence to your own revised citations in some consistent location, for example in the abstract, such as [KEEPTHIS],
Clear all preexisting tags (Misc. Menu),
Tag the articles containing [KEEPTHIS] (use a query or filter [e.g., Criteria = Like "*KEEPTHIS*"] to find them, or, better, create an Update query)
Export the tagged [KEEPTHIS] citations (Misc. Menu) to a text file (e.g., mydata.txt)
Create a new empty MedRefs data file (e.g., CFS11056.MDB) from the Misc. Menu
Transfer the [KEEPTHIS] citations from mydata.txt into the Temp table of CFS11056.MDB and then into the permanent table (Main Menu)
Download the new text version of CFSFMNA.TXT database and transfer its citations into the Temp table (Main Menu)
Press Untag Dupl in the Temp Table form so that any articles with UIs that are already found in the Permanent Table (i.e., your revisions and additions) will prevent importing the "duplicate" citation with the same UI that I have provided
Now transfer the tagged citations in the Temp Table to the Permanent Table. You will then have retained all your revised citations and any citations that are in the newly downloaded DB that you have not revised, but you will of course be missing any of my revisions of any citation that you also revised (not a big problem).

You may need to consult the Access manual to figure out some of the details.

Michael McGoodwin, M.D.