Color Marks

Marks have been a popular feature of Breedmate for many years but there have been requests to add more colors, protect the colors from being changed and to also add more marks, i..e let a row have more than one mark.

Well all those requests have now been answered. The way we have done it is to allow users to define their own Color mark columns. The screen shot below shows the sample dog database with two color mark columns. To set the color of one or more cells simply select them then right click inside the select and click on "Select Color" from the context menu. Of course you can also use the click and drag feature of Breedmate - just click in a cell with the left mouse button then drag it to another cell and release the button - thus copying the source cell to the target.

Creating a Color Mark Column

Breedmate allows the user to modify or add new columns to any table - the color mark columns are added in the same way. In the grid view click on the green triangle button. Scroll down the list until you see an unused field, i.e. one that doesn't have a name, call it something like Mark 1 (the name doesn't matter), then set the Type to Integer and the Format to Color. Click on the green triangle to return to the normal normal grid view.

Moving the Columns

This is really a general topic that applies to any column but we mention it here because its likely that you will want your color mark column to appear on the left of the grid. This is easy to do using Tools-Field Chooser menu item. This brings up the dialog shown below. If you wanted you new column to appear next to the Name field, click on the Sex field which is just below the name, scroll down the list then click on the field just above your new color mark column "Mark 1" then click on the "Down" button. This moves the select ecolumns down the display order so now Mark 1 is shown in the grid just to the lect of the Name column.

The result of doing this is displayed below:

Viewing Records with a Particular Color Mark

This is easy to do using normal Breedmate commands. Just click on a color mark cell then use Mark-Clear to clear any marks then Mark-Substring to mark anny other records thatr have the same color in this this column. Now that we have records marked use the View-View Marks Onlt command to see just the marked records.

Transferring Marks to Color Marks

There are lots of powerful marking commands in Breedmate. But how do wwe transfer a mark to a color mark? Well similar to the previous description we first use View-View Marks Only to only show marked records, then right click on the top of the color mark column and select Set Color then set whatever color you like. This is shown in the screen shot below which also shows the colr dialog used to select a color. Note that virtually any color can now be set. Note also that because color marks are regular fields, they won;t change when normal mark commands are used.

Display Color Marks in a Pedigree

To do this you need to actually modify the pedigree form. The new DogForms60.fmx form file has an example of how to do this. The 4G Pedigree form has been modified to show two color mark columns Mark1 and Mark2. To see how its done open that form then click on the design view (green triangle). The color marks columns are added like any other column, click on the blue rectangle button then draw a small rectangle in the ancestor where you want it to appear, set the field to Mark 1 etc as shown below:

The end result is shown in a screen shot below that display the two color mark columns for the two parents. You can of course edit the form to place these in any or all ancestors.