Requirement Descriptions Cut off in Merit Badge Progress and Rank Progress Reports

Scoutbook Scoutbook Bugs
1

While the Report Builder Designer intentionally (I disagree it should) shortens each rank requirement into a few summary meaning words, when you do a Merit Badge Progress Report and export to PDF it heavily cuts off the description (whether it is generated in portrait or landscape mode). If you export the report to CSV, any requirement description that is more than 200 characters (I exported a few random one that were cut off and did a character count) is cut off.

This then causes me to go in ScoutBook and have to copy the cut off characters from each of the requirement descriptions under a scout’s advancement progress that were cut off, into the CSV report (wasting a lot of time). I did check what CSV field limitations were and from what I can see there are no limitations, “but some software to view CSV data might have trouble with too large fields.” For Excel, text cells can hold up to 32,767 characters (255 characters for headers and footers) so there is no reason to have this character limitation in the report.

2

Just checking to see if anyone from SUAC has looked into this, confirmed it and reported it up the chain…

3

@WilliamCunnane - is this really mission critical???

4

I didn’t realize a bug should only be reported if someone determines that it is mission critical. I’m not looking for it to be fixed this week, just that someone has looked at it and confirms it, “yep, that is not working as it should.”

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@WilliamCunnane - no a bug should be reported. I suspect it was intended to have the reqs shortened. It does however seem to be a low priority thing.

Does an export of advancement show the longer description

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Could you clarify which report you are looking at? I tried the Merit Badge In-Progress report from the troop reports menu, but it does not show requirement descriptions/words at all.

7

you are only focusing on the advancement report, which yes seems to have been a directed decision. The second part is that merit badge requirements are being cut off after 200 characters. Program leaders and merit badge counselors print these reports to track who needs what and also track while we are teaching the merit badge during a unit activity (sometimes in the middle of the woods with no connectivity). It would be useful if the report showed the requirement in its entirety, especially as it is shown on the web output of the report. It is only cut off when exporting to PDF or CSV.

8

@WilliamCunnane - could you lay out hiw you get to this merit badge report

And how about printing the merit badge requirements from scouting.org ahead of time. Sone of the requirements have a gooc deal of text.

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