Understanding The Big Picture

This website is designed to become the single greatest, most complete APBT Resource ever. It is an ongoing project that will continuously be developed and expanded. To understand and utilize this site to its full potential, it will be helpful to familiarize yourself with how it works, the starting point of which is The Navigation Bar (followed by the corresponding Sub-Navigation Menu Links). You will notice at the top of each page are the following Navigation Tabs (Home | Blogs | Education | Forums | Pedigrees | Products). Well, every time you click on one of these Navigation Tabs, a new set of Sub-Navigation Menu Links pops up just underneath them, which are always relevant to that particular section of the Database System. Therefore, when you click on Pedigrees Navigation Tab, the key Ultimate Pedigree Database page options get displayed on the Sub-Navigation Menu as follows:



Each of these potential Sub-Navigation page options (Add Bulldog | Search Bulldogs | Add Breeding | Search Breedings | Test Breeding | Add Breeder | Add Owner | Statistics) corresponds to a whole different database table, and yet they are all interconnected in the registering/storing/displaying of your dogs and the relevant information about them. To show the inter-connectivity between these pages, and how they all work together, I will now discuss the use of each one in turn:



The databases themselves are designed to record (in separate tables) every important aspect of a dog’s description that can be entered, with precision. It took a lot of time to set things up this way, but ultimately the benefit to you as a user means there is 1) more uniformity and 2) less chance of data error, conflicting/duplicate information, etc. For example, you cannot ‘write’ the color Red as your dog’s coat color, you must select that option from the dropdown menu (same with the colors buckskin, brindle, black, seal, etc.). And so it is, on down the line, with all of the fixed data possibilities. The advantage to doing things this way is that there is no chance for spelling error and, as such, all of this information will be stored accurately. Where this can be come critical (or at least fascinating) over time is, say for example you want to do a search of all brindle-colored dogs that made Champion, you can select ‘brindle’ in the checkbox, and Champion from the dropdown menu, and very quickly the database will be able to retrieve a roster of every Champion dog that was brindle in color. This would be impossible to do if people could misspell either ‘brindle’ or ‘Champion’, so by removing the user ability to write these down (and thus make a mistake), and by replacing these options with uniform pre-set selections, all of this data can be sorted accurately, without the possibility for error. As the resources here grow to enormous proportions over time, this kind of accuracy and precision of data retrieval will simply become invaluable. Therefore, please do take the time to read each and every one of the above links, so that you can do your part in contributing to (and benefiting from) this Resource.

Thank you for taking the time to read these instructions IN FULL. Your doing so will not only save me time (by not forcing me to spell-out for you what is already covered here), but it will save you time as well, simply because you will be able to fully-understand and enjoy the full benefits of this Resource right from the get-go. I thank you sincerely for joining today, and if you have any questions not covered here, please post them on this thread. Thanks again!