Once you have created the fields in trackers, you have defined what kind of data you want to collect - with items you are now collecting that data.

Creating the tracker and defining the fields are generally part of the configuration of a site, performed by the site admins - items, on the other hand are what you want the users (ok, who may also be the admins) to do. Therefore you may want to revisit how the assign permissions to groups settings are established, to ensure that the permissions create tracker items is given to the groups you intend to have using the tracker.

Once designed, the tracker can now be inserted into any wiki page (or article or blog?) using the PluginTracker. By default each tracker can be viewed at its own unique url, from the list trackers page. But if you want users to find it, better use the plugin.

Items can be inserted into a tracker either directly from the visualization of the tracker (tiki-view_tracker.php?trackerId=N), being N the identification number of the tracker (trackerId)

or from a Wiki page where PluginTracker has been included with appropriate syntax. For instance:

{TRACKER(trackerId=>2, fields=>5:8:11:30:12:35:36:39, action=>Add to Staff, 
showtitle=>y, showdesc=>y, showmandatory=>y, embedded=>y)}
The item was added successfully. ''(Click to another link to continue, or go to 
[index.php|Home Page])''{TRACKER}

Would produce:

After inserted an item, this message would be show at the wiki page where the tracker plugin was placed:

Keep in mind that fields with an asterisk on their right hand side are compulsory. See for instance the "Name and surnames *" field from the example above:

This means that, if they are not filled, or they don't contain the proper data type (depending on how the tracker has been configured), when you want to insert the item in the tracker a message will appear showing which fields are missing to be properly completed, in order to submit your item to the tracker successfully.

If you want a massive addition of items into a tracker, you can use the "Import CSV data" feature. It can be found at "Admin Tracker (i.e. tiki-admin_trackers.php?trackerId=1, for instance) > Import/Export (tab) > Import/Export CSV Data (bottom of page)":

In order to successfully import data, you'd better export, first, some items manually added to the tracker through tiki interface out to a spreadsheet program. To do so, you can click on "Download CSV export | tracker_1.csv" (see the image above).

Then, open that file in your favorite spreadsheet program (such as OpenOffice.org Calc - OOo Calc -), add some rows, but don't change anything in the header (first line), not even delete unused columns. Keep in mind that decimal values are only recognized with a point as a decimal seperator; otherwise they will be read as text. (As a last resort you may change the seperator sign by editing the tracker item after importing to fix this.)

Then save the file back to csv format. You'd better manually select the CSV settings; in OOo, through clicking on the "Edit filter settings" checkbox, and thus, selecting utf-8 encoding for the character set, "," (comma) as field delimiter, and '"' (double quotation mark) as text delimiter:

Now you can import your data file in the tracker through "Admin Tracker > Import/Export (tab) > Import/Export CSV Data (bottom of page) > Import file > Browse the file > hit save"

Take note that the items will be added to the tracker, and if some of them were already present, they will be duplicated. So if you don't want to this to happen, remove the rows that you don't want to be duplicated.

Also note that Office 2007's Excel program will not allow you to set text delimiter, and also appears to output a csv file that is not compatible with the tracker's import function. OpenOffice's Calc program appears to work perfectly, as long as the above instructions for formatting and delimiting are followed.

Using OO3.1 as described worked with Tiki admin tracker importcsv - but only when the you ignore the note on that page and leave the header as it was on export.