Chart dates and non-standard GEDCOM
Posted: 16 Nov 2002 20:48
Chart dates and non-standard GEDCOM
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 12:43:37 +0100
David Meredith wrote: >> dates subject to a 'Before' - Between' - 'After' will not appear on screen charts on my system.
Little bit of background. When you refer to an item of data in Family Historian, an expression is created called a 'Date Reference'. Even if you want to create custom queries and custom text schemes, you never have to create these yourself. You can always select from a tree-structured list, and get Family Historian to generate them for you. Data References are mainly used in Queries and in Text Schemes. For example, if you want to insert a person's data of birth in a particular part of a text scheme, you can use the expression %INDI.BIRT.DATE%. For those who know GEDCOM, 'INDI' is the GEDCOM tag for an individual. 'BIRT' is the GEDCOM tag for a Birth. And 'DATE' is the GEDCOM tag for a date.
The expression %INDI.BIRT.DATE% will drop in the the date OK. But in what format? You might want the date 12 May 2001 to be displayed as:
2001 12 May 2001 12/5/2001 etc.
Wherever you generate an expression to refer to a date, you can always 'qualify' the date to indicate how you want it to be displayed (the AGE_AT at qualifier is unusual in that it doesn't put the date at all - it puts the person's age instead - if that can be calculated). Qualifiers look like lower-level tags, but aren't. Real tags represent data that has been stored in your file. Qualifiers provide options that solely concern how data is *displayed*. Nearly all dates have 9 different qualifiers. Qualifiers are always preceded by a colon. So for example,
%INDI.BIRT.DATE:YEAR%
will extract the year from a person's date-of-birth and just display that.
Most of the standard text schemes use the qualifier :MEDIUM or :SHORT. Unfortunately, it appears that these (and other qualifiers) do not output anything if you use a date range (before, after, between). This is wrong. They should. The solution for now, is to not use qualifiers at all. That way, you will get the default date format for dates, and this does show 'range' dates properly. If you have a text scheme that you like, you can copy it and remove qualifiers from the copy, as follows:
(1) Go to the Text tab of the Diagram Options dialog. (2) Click 'New' to create a new text scheme. Give it a new unique name. Set 'Base New Scheme On' to the old text scheme that you want to copy. Click on OK. The new scheme should now be showing in the 'Scheme:' box. (3) In the 'Box Type' list, select each box type in turn (you can ignore any that don't have an asterisk against them, as they will be empty). For each box type, edit the template for that box type so that wherever you see an expression which contains DATE:MEDIUM, you delete the :MEDIUM part. (4) That's it. Press OK to close the Diagram Options dialog. You don't need to explicitly save your changes to the new text scheme. They will be saved automatically.
The negative about the above is that you may find that dates are now in a longer format than you may wish. I have added fixing the date qualifiers to support date ranges, to the wish list.
Fred Rump wrote >> I would hope that we can get an option to read non-standard GEDCOM input which has only one @ in email addresses
I entirely agree with this (and indeed the more general requirement for tolerance of all kinds of non-standard GEDCOM, wherever possible). I hope to include this kind of thing in 2.1 (its probably the second priority after reports).
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 12:43:37 +0100
David Meredith wrote: >> dates subject to a 'Before' - Between' - 'After' will not appear on screen charts on my system.
Little bit of background. When you refer to an item of data in Family Historian, an expression is created called a 'Date Reference'. Even if you want to create custom queries and custom text schemes, you never have to create these yourself. You can always select from a tree-structured list, and get Family Historian to generate them for you. Data References are mainly used in Queries and in Text Schemes. For example, if you want to insert a person's data of birth in a particular part of a text scheme, you can use the expression %INDI.BIRT.DATE%. For those who know GEDCOM, 'INDI' is the GEDCOM tag for an individual. 'BIRT' is the GEDCOM tag for a Birth. And 'DATE' is the GEDCOM tag for a date.
The expression %INDI.BIRT.DATE% will drop in the the date OK. But in what format? You might want the date 12 May 2001 to be displayed as:
2001 12 May 2001 12/5/2001 etc.
Wherever you generate an expression to refer to a date, you can always 'qualify' the date to indicate how you want it to be displayed (the AGE_AT at qualifier is unusual in that it doesn't put the date at all - it puts the person's age instead - if that can be calculated). Qualifiers look like lower-level tags, but aren't. Real tags represent data that has been stored in your file. Qualifiers provide options that solely concern how data is *displayed*. Nearly all dates have 9 different qualifiers. Qualifiers are always preceded by a colon. So for example,
%INDI.BIRT.DATE:YEAR%
will extract the year from a person's date-of-birth and just display that.
Most of the standard text schemes use the qualifier :MEDIUM or :SHORT. Unfortunately, it appears that these (and other qualifiers) do not output anything if you use a date range (before, after, between). This is wrong. They should. The solution for now, is to not use qualifiers at all. That way, you will get the default date format for dates, and this does show 'range' dates properly. If you have a text scheme that you like, you can copy it and remove qualifiers from the copy, as follows:
(1) Go to the Text tab of the Diagram Options dialog. (2) Click 'New' to create a new text scheme. Give it a new unique name. Set 'Base New Scheme On' to the old text scheme that you want to copy. Click on OK. The new scheme should now be showing in the 'Scheme:' box. (3) In the 'Box Type' list, select each box type in turn (you can ignore any that don't have an asterisk against them, as they will be empty). For each box type, edit the template for that box type so that wherever you see an expression which contains DATE:MEDIUM, you delete the :MEDIUM part. (4) That's it. Press OK to close the Diagram Options dialog. You don't need to explicitly save your changes to the new text scheme. They will be saved automatically.
The negative about the above is that you may find that dates are now in a longer format than you may wish. I have added fixing the date qualifiers to support date ranges, to the wish list.
Fred Rump wrote >> I would hope that we can get an option to read non-standard GEDCOM input which has only one @ in email addresses
I entirely agree with this (and indeed the more general requirement for tolerance of all kinds of non-standard GEDCOM, wherever possible). I hope to include this kind of thing in 2.1 (its probably the second priority after reports).
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer