[SA 120116 made changes affecting what's talked about in this post, see http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=36&p=9010&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1]

Met with SD yesterday primarily to discuss two things: how to link together criminals from different trials that are the same person, and how to link trials in different trial_files to each other (i.e. for a bunch of criminals tried for the same crime). We determined that the simplest, quickest, and therefore most prudent way to do this is to use an "id" attribute to link together the elements as required. So, if two <criminal> elements both describe the same person, then each <criminal> element in question should look like this:

<criminal id="myuniqueidentifier">
(stuff)
</criminal>

where "myuniqueidentifir" can be any string as long as it's the same for each criminal that should be treated as the same person. <criminal> elements that don't correspond to any other <criminal> element do <strong>not</strong> need an id attribute.

Similarly, for <trial> elements that refer to the same trial (but a different criminal):

<trial rel="5">
(stuff)
</trial>

In the case of trials, 'rel' does not have to be absolutely unique, just unique within one court session (i.e the same trial_file_start_date and trial_file_end_date values). SD requested this to make it easier to keep track of the numbers.

I will be able to alter the import script to account for these new attributes, but I'm not sure if SD will have a chance to go over all of the data before my contract is up.