While working on a new progress report for the Scottish Wildlife Trust that takes all their site data and analyses it at a regional level to show the amount of time planned and actual to date for priority 1, 2 and 3 projects, planned and actual staff time, volunteer, contractor time, expenditure and income, it has become obvious that some protocols in creating regional codes is useful.

SWT have created two sets of regions in the CMS Region codes (see Utilities - System Manager - Setup codes). One is at the local authority level allowing them to do queries for these local authorities. However, internally, they work to larger regional units. It is simple to have both sets of codes in the CMS Region table as you can multi-tag sites so one site may be tagged to both "Aberdeenshire" and "North East SWT region".

However, for reporting purposes, it is useful to be able to quickly seperate these two types of region code and the simplest way to do this is with a prefix to the code. For example, the local authority area codes could be prefixed with "LA_" and the SWT regions with "0_" or "SWT_". Of course, it does not matter what the prefix is as long as it is consistent.

If you would like to do this and already have datasets established, it is not difficult to do this retrospectively but contact exeGesIS about this if you are on Support.