ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Tests page > Running tests > After testing > Deleting an animal from an experiment

Deleting an animal from an experiment

Introduction

If you want to remove an animal from an experiment then the easiest thing to do is to delete it. In fact, deleting an animal is a bit of a misnomer as animals aren't actually deleted; they're marked as deleted - this has the advantage that you can undelete them later if you want to.

To be strictly accurate, you can completely remove an animal from an experiment but only if it's had no tests performed on it. In this case you can use the Experiment page to delete animals (see Deleting animals from an experiment), or reduce the N of the animal's treatment group - this is described fully in the Reducing the number of animals in a treatment group topic.

Details

How to delete an animal

Click the Animal number on the Test schedule report.

The Animal details report will open. Towards the top of this report is a drop list titled Status.

Open the drop list and change the animal's status to Deleted. It's also a good idea to record why you deleted the animal in the notes area.

The animal will be deleted from the experiment - it won't take part in any future tests and those tests it's already had will be excluded from the experiment's results.

Note that the animal still actually exists - this has the advantage that you can still access the Animal's details report where you can see what tests were performed on the animal and see the notes explaining why it was deleted. Of course it also means you can un-delete the animal.

How to un-delete an animal

If you want to un-delete an animal (i.e. include it's performed tests in the experiment and have it participate in tests again) then you should simply follow the above steps and set the animal's status back to Normal.

Note that when an animal is un-deleted it's possible that it will be behind the other animals in the experiment, for example, they may be in a future stage while the newly un-deleted animal still has trials in an earlier stage to complete. The effect of this will be to 'block' the tests of the other animals until the un-deleted animal has caught up.

A deleted animal can disappear completely from the Test schedule report

If an animal has had at least one test and you then delete it will still have it's one performed test shown on the Test schedule report (at least it will have, if the Include cancelled tests box is checked), however, if the animal has never had any tests performed and you delete it then it'll disappear from the Test schedule report completely.

This may not seem too important, but it will cause a problem if you want to un-delete the animal because to do this you need to access the Animal's details report which you'd normally do by clicking the animal number on the Test schedule report. The solution to this problem is to switch to the Experiment page and there select the View animals button in the ribbon bar. This will open the Animals spreadsheet where you can edit the status of any animal in the experiment.

ANY-maze help topic T0824