Lokate ยท Logs
A pile of logs is a record. Read the right way, it is also a picture of how your dog works, how you handle, and what you keep missing. Quick Report, Quick Review and the Journal are three ways to read that picture.
Most handlers still log with pencil and paper, and most logging apps copy that: one sheet per session, filed away. Logs get kept because someone might ask for them. A certification board. A court that wants to know whether your dog can do what you say it can. Cover yourself, file it, move on.
A season of logs is more than cover. It is a data set. Somewhere in a hundred sessions is the turn your dog overshoots every time, the junction where you stop trusting your dog, the runner who has laid half your trails since March. None of it shows on any single page. It only shows when you look across all of them, and with paper, nobody does.
What should we work on next? Who hasn’t been a subject yet? Can I see your logs?
Lokate already holds the logs. These three tools are for reading them back.
Quick Report and Quick Review don’t invent anything. They read the log forms you fill in after each session. So it pays to know how a log form is put together, and why some answers are easy for Lokate to count and others are not.
Every question on a log form is a field. There are two kinds of field you’ll meet most:
Counting only works when the same thing is written the same way every time. Say that over a month your dog overshoots a turn three times, and you log it like this:
| Typed in | Picked from a set |
|---|---|
| overshot turn | Overshot a turn |
| Overshot the corner again | Overshot a turn |
| missed the left | Overshot a turn |
You know the left column is one problem, three times. To a counter, it is three different answers, each seen once, and the pattern you are looking for disappears. The right column is counted as what it is: the same problem, three times.
Lokate does help with typed answers. It groups wording that means the same thing, and it knows SAR language: “crit” and “critering” end up together, and so do “no find” and “no alert”. But that is a best guess. A picked answer is never guessed.
So a good log uses both. Pick for anything you will want to count later: the result, the problems, the surface, the weather. Type for the story, the bits that don’t fit a box.
Some fields let you tick several answers at once, for example a Problems field where a session had both a slow start and a lost junction. Each ticked answer is counted on its own. A problem that turns up once a week, mixed in with others, still stands out by the end of the season.
Names are the hardest thing to keep consistent. The training site you call “Hilltop Park” one week becomes “hilltop pk” the next, and your runner Sam turns into “Sam B” or “Samantha”. Each spelling is counted as a different place or person.
A list fixes that. It is a set of names you write down once, in Settings › Forms & Lists: your training sites, your runners, your flankers. A log field can then offer that list to pick from instead of a blank box. You tap “Hilltop Park”, spelled the same way every time, and Quick Report can tell you exactly how often you have trained there and who laid the trails.
New runner? Add them to the list once, and they are there for every log after.
Every assignment has a discipline: trailing, area search, HRD and so on. Reports and reviews look at one discipline at a time, so your trailing problems are never mixed up with your area work.
Log forms are set up under Settings › Forms & Lists › Form Template Builder. You can start from one of the ready-made forms and change it to suit you.
Open the Assignments list from the map. Tap the filter button at the top right. Under the Filter By choices sit the three tools.
The filter carries over. Pick Training first and Quick Report and Quick Review only look at training sessions; pick Mission to look only at real searches.
Tomorrow you train. Tonight you want to know what to set up. Quick Report goes through your logs and counts the answers, field by field, as rings you can read in a glance.
Tap + for a New Preset. Under Scope, pick how far back to look with History (years): half a year, 1, 2, 3, or All. If you work more than one dog or discipline, pick the Dog and Discipline too.
Fields lists every field that appears in those logs. Tick up to four, the questions you want answered: Problems, Flanker, Subject, Location, Result.
Tap Run. Each field gets its own ring, the largest answers first, up to eight, with the rest under Other.
Read that ring and tomorrow is planned: turns, and junctions after them. Do the same with Subject and you may find one runner has laid a third of your trails. Your dog knows that runner by now, so it’s time to swap.
A ring tells you how often. It can’t tell you why. “Lost at a junction, 6” is worth knowing, but what you train tomorrow depends on what actually happened at those junctions. That is in the sessions themselves, and the ring takes you straight there.
Tap Lost at a junction. You get the six sessions behind it, with their dates. Four in spring, two last month. One date stands out: the trail in town, the day it rained.
The assignment opens on the map, with your track and Fido’s. There it is: he went straight on where the trail turned left, circled the car park twice and picked it up again forty metres on. You remember now.
Open the log for that session and read your notes from the day: “Wind across the junction, I pulled him back too early.” Now it’s clear. It wasn’t the junction. It was the wind, and your hands.
Then back to the ring and on to the next slice. Tap the middle of the ring to list every session at once. That’s the difference between knowing what goes wrong and knowing what to set up tomorrow: a junction with a crosswind, and a longer line.
Tap Save… and give the report a name: “Trailing faults”, “Who laid it”. Next time it is one tap in the Presets list. Swipe a preset to edit, rename or delete it.
Share Report turns the rings into a one-page PDF with your name and handler ID, ready to send to a trainer or keep with your records.
Answers like “none”, “n/a”, “no”, “nothing” and “clear” are left out, so a ring of problems shows only real problems.
Your mentor asks the question every mentor asks. With a paper logbook you hand it over and they flip. With logs filed per assignment, they would have to find their way through an app they have never used, one session at a time. Nobody enjoys that.
Quick Review puts the logbook back. Pick the fields your mentor cares about, and every log is laid out in one continuous stream, newest first, nothing else on the page. They scroll with a thumb, the way they would turn pages.
Quick Review always shows your whole history. To keep it to training sessions, pick Training in the Assignments filter first.
Training sessions have forms. Life doesn’t. Your dog had a limp for three days. He found the neighbour’s cat behind the shed, untrained and unasked. You had an idea in the shower about how to start her on hard surfaces. As every handler knows, you are always training, and much of it never makes it into a log.
The Journal is for all of that. It is free text: your thoughts, your dog’s thoughts if you’re feeling generous. Dated, tagged, and there when you want to look back.
Fido off his food this morning, fine by evening. Vet says watch it. Skipped Thursday’s trail.
Type in the box at the top and tap Add Entry. The date is set for you. Tap an entry’s text later to correct it.
Tap the tag button on an entry and type a tag: Health, Hard surface, Idea, Weird find. Give it a colour if you like. Make as many as you need.
The chips under the box filter the list: tap Health and you have your dog’s medical story in order. The search box finds any word or date, and the paw chips find every entry that names a dog.
Long-press an entry to add a photo. The share button turns the whole journal into a PDF, photos and tags included.
The journal is saved with your dogs, lists and forms, so it is in your archive and comes back on a new phone.
What you log should grow with you and your dog. A question that mattered in the first year may tell you nothing now, and something you never thought to write down may turn out to be the thing you most want to count. So look at your log form now and then. Some handlers do it once a year; some units sit down and do it together.
When you change the form, write a journal entry about it: what you changed, and why. Tag it Log form so all those entries are together.
Log form review with the unit. Added “Wind at start” and “Surface” as pick-lists. Dropped “Mood”: we never used it. Reason: two seasons of junction losses we couldn’t explain without the wind.
Over the years those entries become a history of your method. If your logs are ever questioned, in a certification review or in court, you can show not just what you recorded but how your record-keeping developed and why. That is what a careful professional looks like.
| Tool | Answers | Best moment |
|---|---|---|
| Quick Report | What happens most? What should I train? Who keeps laying my trails? | The evening before training, before a test, at the end of a season |
| Quick Review | What did each session actually look like? | Sitting with a mentor, evaluator or training partner |
| Journal | What else was going on? | Any time something is worth remembering |
One week of logs tells you little. A season tells you how your dog trains, how you train, and where your blind spots are. Keep logging, and look back now and then.