Just finished a major change to the database structure. We’ve always had the concept of Alerts – things that you want to check next time you work the sheep, Notes – Things that stay with the sheep record for life but don’t really fit into any other table and Evaluations – ranking and scoring and measuring the sheep in some fashion.

What became obvious is that the udder status (none, small, medium or large) is really an evaluation at a given time for a sheep and all that data is not really a note but is another type of user defined evaluation. I had already created user evaluations for the estrus status and pregnancy status so I had the structure there. I’ve added the udder status to the user defined evaluations and completed fixing EvaluateSheep to handle dynamic creation of multiple user defined traits with custom results. Next task was to update the database and fix the historical records already in it to reflect the new structure.

I suspect each flock owner will have a slightly different take on what should be a note vs an alert but that is why the system is designed to support either option. For now the new structure seems to make more sense to me.