There is probably a way to do this, using EPIC via the EXEC command to create a small .rec on the fly that can be used as input to a conditional COMMENT LEGAL. Analysis could also create the required .rec of legal values for a patient, but I've never tried to use the EXEC command in a .chk file to run Analysis. The kind of solution MIGHT work - I haven't tried it. However, if none of the first sentence makes sense to you, it is probably not worth trying it out.
Why not just have a list of all of the doctors and pick from that list every time a record is created. This ensures accurate entry of doctors, if you know them all to begin with. Even if you have a few hundred doctors, an alphabetic list is easy to present to the user via COMMENT LEGAL.
EpiData does not have lookup feature that will let you type part of the doctor's name and then see a partial list (except via conditional comment legal). The problem you state is handled "easily" (for an experienced user) by relational databases that can create queries on the fly (ACCESS, etc).
EpiData Entry does have a provision for running small programs to do this sort of thing, but creating those small programs is a task for an experienced programmer. If you have a mission critical requirement and this function will be used every day by many people, it would be worth programming it.
In the long term, this could be an interesting feature to request to have in the Entry Client - essentially the ability to recall from all existing records, the unique values of one field, based on a filter - to be used as a lookup table; plus the ability to add new values. This could be used very frequently in many data entry applications.
Jamie
On 2010-11-24, Thomas wrote:
I need help to find out if it is possible to have the content of several data entry fields listed in a value label.
I am doing a registration of data from patients files and need for statistical purposes (cluster effect) to register the specific doctor that has observed a given event, x-ray, bloodsample etc.
I therefore thought of a way where you have one data entry field for each doctor involved with patient and then everytime you need to assign a doctor to a specific information a complete list (value label) defined by the doctors you previously typed will show and you can then those instead of typing it every time.
How do I do that? Is there some way to write within the value label file that allows a variable value to show?