ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Experiment page > Importing lists of animals or tests > Importing tests

Importing tests

Introduction

When the test schedule for an experiment is very complicated, it's often necessary to use ANY-maze's manual scheduling feature. This allows you to enter tests in any order, making the test schedule completely flexible.

Of course, if you know your schedule is complicated (and that you will therefore need to use manual scheduling), it implies that you have already planned your experiment, in which case you may well have created a test schedule in some other system, for example, in Microsoft Excel. In these circumstances it would make sense to simply import the schedule from that other system, rather than having to retype all the tests into ANY-maze. This is what the test import feature does.

Creating a list of tests to import

ANY-maze uses a standard file format called Comma-Separated Values, usually abbreviated to CSV, for test import. A CSV file is simply a text file with data on different rows and with individual values separated by commas - for example:

Animal,Apparatus,Novel side

C1A4,Box 1,Left

C1A2,Box 2,Right

Microsoft Excel includes an option to save files in CSV format, and this often the easiest way to create the files (in this case the commas separate the columns of data that form the spreadsheet).

The actual data in an import file consists of a Header row and any number of Data rows. The header row is the first non-blank row in the file (all blank rows, anywhere in the file are simply ignored). The header row defines the data that will be found in the subsequent data rows.

Each data row adds a test on a specific animal to the experiment, with the tests being scheduled in the order they appear in the file. For example, the file:

Animal

1

2

2

1

will create a schedule in which animal 1 will be tested, then animal 2, then animal 2 again and then animal 1 again. Note that imported tests still have to agree with the number of trials specified in the experiment's protocol, so in this case the protocol would need to include at least two trials otherwise the import would fail.

Valid entries in the file are:

For a field defined in the protocol as a choice field the data for each test must be one of the choices specified for the field. For a field defined as a numeric field, the data must be a numeric value. For a field defined as a text field, the data can be anything, up to a maximum of 80 characters.

Performing an import

To actually import a tests list, you simply need to switch to the Experiment page and click the Import tests button in the ribbon bar (if the Import tests button is disabled it means that you have not chosen to use manual scheduling in the protocol).

Selecting this button will cause a window to open where you can select the CSV file that contains the tests  list. ANY-maze will then read the file and attempt the import - this is a two stage process:

During the first part of the import process (called pre-processing), ANY-maze reads the entire file and checks that it all makes sense. For example, it checks that all the animals specified in the import file actually exist in the experiment. Note that the processing of this check is affected by the current import policies.

If the check is successful, then the system will proceed to actually import the data and add the tests to the experiment's test schedule. At the end of the process a report is displayed showing exactly what the system did - see figure 1 below:

Figure 1. An example of an 'Import tests' report.

See also:

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ANY-maze help topic T0762