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Switching deck type

aplaice edited this page Aug 17, 2024 · 4 revisions

This is about switching between the standard, extended and experimental/interactive decks.

Importing different language versions works seamlessly — the different language versions simply exist side-by-side with separate notes and review histories. For upgrading the version of your deck — for example extended v5.1 to extended v5.2, see here.

In contrast to different language versions, the different deck types (standard, extended and experimental/interactive) act as replacements for each other. This means that all your existing notes are converted to the new note types (e.g. from standard to extended). As a result, the existing fields in the old notes are mapped onto those in the new note types and your existing cards are mapped onto the new cards.

A guide/instructions for each of the six possible changes, are in the next section. The way the mapping works and its general implications are described further down.

Specific guides

When importing you have to make sure that the mappings are as specified in the relevant table.

Standard -> Extended

("Ultimate Geography" -> "Ultimate Geography [Extended]")

Care needed (for cards), but if taken, there is no review history loss.

Cards

Care needed!

Standard Extended
Country - Capital Country - Capital
Capital - Country Capital - Country
Flag - Country Flag - Country
Map - Country Map - Country

where bold means that that value has to be adjusted.

Fields

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country Country
Country info Country info
Capital Capital
Capital info Capital info
Capital hint Capital hint
Flag Flag
Map Map

Standard -> Experimental/Interactive

("Ultimate Geography" -> "Ultimate Geography [Experimental]")

Care needed (for cards), but if taken, there is no review history loss.

Cards

Care needed!

Standard Extended
Country - Capital Country - Capital
Capital - Country Capital - Country
Flag - Country Flag - Country
Map - Country Map - Country

where bold means that that value has to be adjusted.

Fields

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country Country
Country info Country info
Capital Capital
Capital info Capital info
Capital hint Capital hint
Flag Flag
Map Map

Extended -> Experimental/Interactive

("Ultimate Geography [Extended]" -> "Ultimate Geography [Experimental]")

No change needed at all and there will be no data-loss!

Cards

Standard Extended
Country - Capital Country - Capital
Capital - Country Capital - Country
Country - Flag Country - Flag
Flag - Country Flag - Country
Country - Map Country - Map
Map - Country Map - Country

Fields

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country Country
Country info Country info
Capital Capital
Capital info Capital info
Capital hint Capital hint
Flag Flag
Map Map

Extended -> Standard

("Ultimate Geography [Extended]" -> "Ultimate Geography")

Care needed! Unfortunately, whatever you do, your "Country - Map" and "Country - Flag" cards and review histories will be lost, since the cards will no longer exist.

Cards

Care needed!

Standard Extended
Country - Capital Country - Capital
Capital - Country Capital - Country
Country - Flag Nothing
Flag - Country Flag - Country
Country - Map Nothing
Map - Country Map - Country

where bold means that that value has to be adjusted.

Fields

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country Country
Country info Country info
Capital Capital
Capital info Capital info
Capital hint Capital hint
Flag Flag
Map Map

Experimental/interactive -> Extended

("Ultimate Geography [Experimental]" -> "Ultimate Geography [Extended")

No change needed! There will be no data-loss (unless you've created your own notes with a specified "Region code")!

Cards

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country - Capital Country - Capital
Capital - Country Capital - Country
Country - Flag Country - Flag
Flag - Country Flag - Country
Country - Map Country - Map
Map - Country Map - Country

Fields

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country Country
Country info Country info
Capital Capital
Capital info Capital info
Capital hint Capital hint
Flag Flag
Map Map
Region code Nothing

Experimental/interactive -> Standard

("Ultimate Geography [Experimental]" -> "Ultimate Geography")

Care needed! Unfortunately, whatever you do, your "Country - Map" and "Country - Flag" cards and review histories will be lost, since the cards will no longer exist.

Cards

Care needed!

Standard Extended
Country - Capital Country - Capital
Capital - Country Capital - Country
Country - Flag Nothing
Flag - Country Flag - Country
Country - Map Nothing
Map - Country Map - Country

where bold means that that value has to be adjusted.

Fields

No change needed!

Standard Extended
Country Country
Country info Country info
Capital Capital
Capital info Capital info
Capital hint Capital hint
Flag Flag
Map Map
Region code Nothing

Details of mapping system

(This section is mainly for interest, if you want to know some details on how the system works.)

The mappings are controlled by the orders of the fields and cards (i.e. the first field of the old note type is mapped onto the first field of the new note type etc. and similarly for the cards) until exhaustion in either of the note types. In general this is pretty straightforward and almost tautological. For example, the "Country" field in the standard deck is (unsurprisingly!) mapped onto the "Country" field in the extended deck (in both cases it's the first field). Similarly, the "Country - Capital" card in the standard deck is mapped onto the "Capital - Country" card in the extended deck.

When there are more fields in the new note type (e.g. "Region code" which is in the experimental/interactive deck, but not in the standard or extended decks — the experimental/interactive deck has nine fields in total while the standard and extended only have eight), then the default contents for the new/excess fields is set to empty. (However, in practice, for most of the notes, the contents of the field(s) will probably be defined in the deck.json, so it will be set, when importing).

When there are new/extra cards in the new note type (e.g. "Country - Flag" which exists in the extended deck, but not the standard deck), then a new card, with no review history will be created, for all your notes (at least for the notes for which the card is valid — if the note doesn't have a flag set, like for sea entities, then no "Country - Flag" card will be added).

In contrast, if there are fewer fields, then the contents of the "excess" fields will be lost. (This only happens when switching from the experimental/interactive deck to the standard or extended decks.)

Similarly, if there are fewer cards, then these excess cards will be deleted and your review history lost. (This only happens when switching from the experimental/interactive or the extended decks to the standard deck.)

Unfortunately, due to historical technical reasons that are hard to undo (see below if you're very interested), some of the cards are not in the same orders in the differ note types, so they have to be manually adjusted.

Reason for standard/extended deck mismatch

In the standard deck, the order of the four card types was:

  1. Country - Capital
  2. Capital - Country
  3. Flag - Country
  4. Map - Country

In the extended deck, there are two extra card types ("Country - Flag" and "Country - Map"). Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear (probably accident) these weren't simply added as card types 5 and 6, but inserted as 3 and 5, with a changed order:

  1. Country - Capital
  2. Capital - Country
  3. Country - Flag
  4. Flag - Country
  5. Country - Map
  6. Map - Country

This means that if one imports the extended deck over the standard deck, then by default (unless one is careful and changes the mapping), the review histories for "Flag - Country" will be transferred to the new "Country - Flag" card, those for "Map - Country" onto the old "Flag - Country" card, and "Map - Country" will be (falsely) generated as a new card. ("Country - Map" will be correctly generated as a new card.)

The order could be changed in the extended deck, to avoid future issues when upgrading from "standard" to "extended", but this in turn it would result in issues for all current extended deck users — they would have to take care to adjust the mapping when upgrading.

The order for the experimental/interactive deck was kept analogous to that of the order of the extended deck, since the extended->experimental/interactive import was deemed more frequent than the standard->experimental/interactive one.