December 2006

 

Avoiding Menu Obsolescence

 

NYC stores only the recipe name, cookbook name, and cookbook path for each recipe entry in a menu.  Menu entries are not updated when you make changes to your recipes.  The following actions will break the connection between a menu plan recipe and its source:

 

1.       Changing the recipe name;

2.       Changing the recipe’s cookbook name;

3.       Changing the cookbook’s path;

4.       Moving the recipe to another cookbook.

 

The menu can still be printed and viewed, but you won’t be able to view the subject recipe from the menu plan, nor will you be able to do a nutrition analysis for the menu plan that includes the recipe.   

 

Accordingly, if you keep menus over long periods of time, you should consider updating of menus as a necessary part of each NYC upgrade.  This will help you assess whether you really need to upgrade or not.  If you don’t need the new features of an upgrade, it may not be worth the effort to update your menus.

 

Here are some tips that should help your menus survive NYC version upgrade:

 

1. After you install a new version of NYC and do the File… Upgrade… to bring over/upgrade files from your previous installation, put your user folder back into the same path as it was before (using Tools… Data Management… User Folder tab), so that cookbook paths for recipes used in menu entries are unchanged -- this will ensure that the menus still point to the right cookbook.  Or maintain all your cookbooks in a folder somewhere with a folder path that never changes.

 

2. Rigidly adhere to a policy of NOT moving recipes between cookbooks and NOT changing recipe names without updating your menus that use these recipes.  Learn which operations make your menus obsolete (see first paragraph), then avoid those operations or plan to update your menus then.  This will require that you only build menus after you know you have your recipes organized the way you want them.

 

 

 


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