OUT OF THE OFFICE
1998 CSREES ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER'S CONFERENCE
CRISFRMS - PREPARING AD-421 FILES FOR CRIS
WEB FORMS - CHANGES IN AD-416/417 SCREENS

OUT OF THE OFFICE

Pat Downer will be out of the office from March 24 til April 2; please contact Sue Lang (slang@zoo.uvm.edu) or Jan Iron (jiron@vines.colostate.edu) if you need assistance with CRISFRMS or Web Forms during that period.

1998 CSREES ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER'S CONFERENCE

You can still register for this if you had not decided... the web site is http://outreach.missouri.edu/naom/

There will be a presentation on Tuesday afternoon, April 21 highlighting differences between the Web Forms and CRISFRMS, and showing how the Web Forms work for AD-416/417s.

On Wed. ALL DAY, we will have an "open session" with Web forms set up for all sites so you can ask any questions or try anything on demo computers. The conference schedule says from 10:00 a.m. to 2 p.m., but Pat Downer, Sue Lang, and Jan Iron will be there with the Web Forms demo from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 or until people stop coming.

WEB FORMS - CHANGES IN AD-416/417 SCREENS

The AD-416 Web forms now include the ability to submit revisions. If the project to be revised is in your 1997 checklist, the project identifying data will be retrieved for you if you enter the accession number.

AD-416 Web form instructions for investigators are now available. Since the AD-416 process is conducted quite differently at different sites, you may need to modify them to fit your needs. As always, we appreciate any feedback and suggestions for improvement. We are working on an option to include AD-417 instructions as well.

CRISFRMS - PREPARING AD-421 FILES FOR CRIS

REPEAT:

If you are using CRISFRMS for AD-421s, you MUST upgrade to 6.5! We are still seeing files coming in from old versions!

AND, if you are using CRISFRMS, you are still stuck with the old 1520 character limitation for narratives and publications! Only the Web forms allow expanded fields.

When you prepare the AD-421 files for CRIS, you cannot specify a file name. You are asked to give only the target drive and directory, such as A: or C:\CRISDATA or if you specify only C:, it will go to your CRISFRMS program directory, which is always the default.

Do NOT try to give a file name at the time you generate these files. If you do, CRISFRMS will think the file name you entered is a directory name and treat it as such, resulting in the same file being overwritten 3 times with each of the 3 different file contents.

What you should end up with is 3 files, always named CRIS421.PRO, CRIS421.TER, and CRIS421.CST. You will need to rename them yourself before submitting them to CRIS by FTP (if you send diskettes, just leave them as CRIS421.*).

When you prepare AD-416 files for CRIS, you are prompted with a drive, directory and the file name CRIS416.DAT. You can enter a different file name for the AD-416s, such as NEV416.DAT (but please use .DAT as the filename extension), but the other files generated will automatically be given the same name (NEV416) plus the extension .PJO (for the signatures, 662, and project outline information) and .CST (for the new CRIS data file format), so you should end up with NEV416.DAT, NEV416.PJO, and NEV416.CST.

And, this is a good time to remind those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, that the Web Forms are the way of the future, where you don't have to prepare any files or transmit them to CRIS, just "press" a "submit" button when the reports are ready.

If you wish to become a participating site, contact Sue Lang at slang@zoo.uvm.edu.

Pat Downer
pdowner@zoo.uvm.edu