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We have a few patrols that are no longer used, and I would like to delete them. I noticed that when I change a patrol’s name, it also changes the patrol name in the previous leadership section for all previous patrol leadership. Before I start removing unused patrols, I would like to make sure that I am not going to remove previous leadership in the same stroke. Anyone know?
For that matter, is there some way to change a patrol name without also causing the previous leadership section to change for each scout?
Patrols have a unique number in Scoutbook. This is why when you change the name of a patrol, it changes the name of leadership positions associated with that patrol.
If you disapprove a patrol in Scoutbook, the patrol will still exist in the database, but you will no longer have access to it. The patrol name associated with the Scout leadership positions will still exist.
The only way to change a patrol name without changing the previous leadership patrol names is to create a new patrol, move the Scouts into it then disapprove the old patrol.
As Jennifer said, in the database, each patrol is identified by a unique number. There is only one field to store the patrol name so when the name is changed in the DB, every instance of that name changes in Scoutbook.
What we’ve done is prepended a character string (ZZ_DISBANDED) to our now-unused patrols so that the scouts in our current database who had leadership or memberships in those patrols retain the information, but the patrols are stuck on the end of the patrol listings, more or less out of the way.
This workaround is clunky at best, and I’m hoping that “future Scoutbook” has a better way to handle this so that units which have a high turnover rate in patrols/patrol names don’t end up with a laundry list of “dead” patrols in the indices. It seems like, from a programming POV, the leadership role should be a property of the scout object, and that it only needs to have the patrol name with which it is associated verified against a list of “current” patrol objects when the dates of leadership are current. Consider, for example, the case of a scout who changes units after having occupied a patrol-level leadership role in that unit. Do those scout’s patrol leadership roles get “transferred” to the patrol into which he or she has transferred, since the patrol name from the prior troop would no longer be valid in the new one? I haven’t been able to test this case, since most of our new scouts are transferred in from Webelos dens, but depending on exactly how the code is written, it could be an interesting test case. Consider the scout who has occupied a leadership position in a patrol which is no longer extant. The “ease” of picking a patrol name from a dropdown list is sometimes outweighed by the
I would suggest that a free text option be added for patrol names that would permit entry of “past” patrols, and which would throw a warning that the patrol name entered does not match a current patrol. If it does match, then it will link the role to that patrol in the manner that the current codebase appears to.
You can just disapprove the old patrols if they are cluttering up your roster, and the leadership positions will still exist. The issue is that once the patrol is disapproved, there isn’t really a way to bring the patrol back.
