Summary:
The following illustrates a scenario where a fair or show wishes to let exhibitors nominate or specify very early on, how many entries of each division they "think" they will enter. For our example, suppose an exhibitor plans on working with 8 Market Steers and later will choose which of these he/she wishes to actuall bring to the fair for showing. The fair will allow them to first create these 8 "entries" and then months down the road, the fair will have the exhibitor log back into the online entries site and choose from these 8 validated (nominated) Market Steers, which ones they are bringing, plus specify a few more information bits about them, such as animal name, etc.
Steps:
The fair will have "two" online entries sessions. One for validation (early in the year) and another later on where they make the changes.
During the Validation session, the fair allows "anyone" to create the entries, collecting just the minimal info (the exhibitor just creates 8 entries for example, designating the Division only).
Time goes by and the validation period is now over.... the fair closes the website and now downloads all of these entries. The fair then assign these entries a Validation Number either manually or in an automated way in ShoWorks using the Tools>Renumber Records. The fair might then mail the exhibitors the credentials if needed, but the main thing at this point is that the fair has a rough count of entries and have now assigned entries a Validation Number.
More time (months) go by... and the fair is ready to finalize the entries. The fair opens a brand new session for online entries. This time however, the fair must go into ShoWorks and change the Entry Deadlines to a later date, set the "Animal Name", "Bred", or any other fields as "required", and place a check in the box "Requires validation for entries" for each division (found under the "Online Options" tab in the Divisions menu). The data file is uploaded again but this time during the upload process, the user must select the "Entries" checkbox so that nominated entries are also uploaded.
When the exhibitor logs in at this point, they will see a list of their 8 entries in which they can choose from. They will only be able to add entries that have previously been validated. So for example if they only are brining 5 of the previously 8 validated, they will only be able to select from the prior nominations of that division. Once this period is over, the fair will download as usual, but will run a process in ShoWorks to delete the original validation entries (otherwise, the file would have the original 8 entries PLUS the new 5 entries). Now all remaining entries are not only validated, but have any additional information that was collected online during the entry process.
