* Property Box Facts tab - a Place problem

[E Wilcock]

One of the things people miss when coming to fh from TMG and other programs such as Roots Magic and Legacy is the Person view - a chronological list of all facts for an individual, with the date first and then the place.
The nearest thing in fh is the Facts Tab in the Property Box, with the Property box floating.

I have started using fh for one of my personal family trees and am in some trouble with this - because there is no display of the places where each event took place.

There are many careers, in the army, the church or academic where a person may move from town to town and it is important to list those moves in order to see the likely birth places for his or her children.

May be the fact that they are not showing is down to my data entry in fh?

My example of the career of a Professor starts with Education facts.
In the field Education I typed Physics
In the field Place, I typed Manchester
In address I typed The University
and in Notes I typed He was taught by the physicist John Smith.

The Facts list shows Educ Physics. Like wise if I put in the he completed his doctorate.

It seems that this first field in fh Education fact is intended to hold an address and town? But then what is the Place field for?

Then we come to Occupation. If I put in that he was Lecturer at University College, that shows on the Facts panel list. But if I add the particular city London in the place field - that doesnt show.

It seems that if one wants the Place to show in the property box list of fh, one must duplicate every career move by using a Residence fact as well?

Yet there is no consistency. Looking at data brought in from TMG (which I do not intend to re-enter) the Place is displayed for some Events such as immigration and naturalisation. These are Events in fh where a fh place field follows the fh date field. But the place doesnt show up for instance with marriage or military service.
And for facts where the Place does not show up on the list, one doesnt seem to be able to force it, e.g. by leaving the first field in military service blank. That produces just a blank on screen.

I hope there is a way round this - either through customisation of the display or data entry as it seems to me an essential for any genealogy software.

[arthurk]

The Main tab of the Property Box can be customised by clicking the gear wheel in its toolbar and selecting Customise Data Entry..., but the Facts tab is done differently. This confused me initially too, and getting to the options is a bit more complex.

From the menu item Tools select Fact Types... then the particular fact you want to customise. Then select Edit, and in the Fact Definition window, the Advanced button. In the top half of this next window tick to Use Override Template for Facts Tab Listings, and enter what you want, with the help of the Insert Code button. This is (I think) almost infinitely customisable to your wishes.

For what it's worth, the template I use for Occupation is {label}: {value}<, {_place}>
This gives an output such as Occupation: Schoolteacher, Leeds, WRY
Anything in the <> brackets is omitted if that particular field is empty.

[tatewise]

You will glad to hear that there is customisation to resolve many of those Facts tab displays.

First a little explanation.
You may be aware that there are many types of fact shown in the Facts tab.
Blue bullets indicate Individual facts (Events or Attributes).
Red bullets indicate Family facts (almost always Events).
Grey bullets indicate Timeline facts (always Events).
Blue arrows indicate Fact Witnesses.

See how_to:narrative_report_fact_sentence_templates|> Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates and under Default Fact Definitions see "In any of the above above dialogues, click the Advanced button to reveal Override Templates for the Property Box dialogue Facts tab" where most of the above can be customised.

The Blue bullet Individual Events do not need customising.

The Blue bullet Individual Attributes can be customised as arthurk suggests. The important codes are {value} and {place} that represent the value of the Attribute and the Place field prefixed with in.
e.g. Occup. {value} {place} will give Occup. Lecturer at University College in London

The Red bullet Family Events can also be customised to add Place.
e.g. Marriage {place} will give Marriage in London to John (where to John is added magically).

The Grey bullet Timeline facts cannot be customised.

The Blue arrow Fact Witnesses can similarly be customised via the Edit Role dialogue.

[AdrianBruce]

Seems to me, and no doubt I will be corrected if wrong(!), that the usual "Template for Facts Tab Listings" includes the place for events (which include Residence) but exclude the place for attributes - but note that I've not checked anything more than a couple of my people. I must admit that my fact tab listing is usually quite narrow, so the value of the attribute takes up so much space that I've not missed the absence of the place.

In experimenting just, I found {abbr} to be of use because this gave me Occup instead of Occupation.

Re not noticing the omission of the place - when my father's value for his Military Service reads "230th (104th Cheshire HG) Rocket AA Battery, Anti-Aircraft Home Guard", I can't think how wide the Facts Tab Listing would need to be to show a place! So I won't bother customising that one to add Place...

[tatewise]

Essentially you are correct Adrian, except that Residence is formally an Attribute without a Value and so on the Facts tab uses the same default Template as Individual Events. Note that Family Events us a different default Template with the Spouse forename intead of Place.

Rather than use {label} or {abbr} it is clearer to just use plain text for the fact name.

You could put the Place before the Value: e.g. Mil. Serv: {place} was {value}

[E Wilcock]

Thank you both -
I am very relieved yes. Mike.

I had looked at what I thought were all the options for customising the Property Box - But hadnt understood about Templates and editing them. Thank you for the guidance. I will now take action.

[E Wilcock]

That is done - Thank you.

What is more, editing the override for just 3 Events has produced an Individual Facts Tab list that (when undocked) is as good as or better than I had in TMG. I need to e-mail someone and tell them to look at this thread.

[AdrianBruce]

Rather than use {label} or {abbr} it is clearer to just use plain text for the fact name.

Very true - it just seems a bit of a cheat and unconsciously makes me reluctant to write it down publicly!

[BillH]

The Red bullet Family Events can also be customised to add Place.
e.g. Marriage {place} will give Marriage in London to John (where to John is added magically).

Is there any way to have it say Marriage to John in London?

It would be nice to have the person first so I don't have to scroll to see it. I tried a few variations, but could not get that result.

[BobWard]

I was thinking the same thing Bill. I could not find a way to make it do that either.

[tatewise]

Whatever you do it will still append to spouse forename on the right.

It is complex, because it is a Family Event that can appear in the husband's Individual Facts tab, wife's Individual Facts tab, and their Family Facts tab.

So when in the husband's Individual Facts tab, it must say to wife's forename.
And when in the wife's Individual Facts tab, it must say to husband's forename.
May be we don't care what it says in the Family Facts tab.

Assuming it is feasible at all, the expression is going to be conditional and quite complex.
If I get a moment, will have a look.

[E Wilcock]

From the menu item Tools select Fact Types... then the particular fact you want to customise. Then select Edit, and in the Fact Definition window, the Advanced button. In the top half of this next window tick to Use Override Template for Facts Tab Listings, and enter what you want, with the help of the Insert Code button. This is (I think) almost infinitely customisable to your wishes.

For what it's worth, the template I use for Occupation is {label}: {value}<, {_place}>

Arthur - I copied this Thank you.
I am not fussed by inserting punctuation. But it is time I got to grips with the detail of fh.
Can you tell me please what is the significance of the underscore before the field place?

[Jane]

The template code _place renders place with out the in on the front.

You can see the details of all the template codes in the help.

[arthurk]

Thank you, Jane - I was away from the computer.

This has reminded me of a related matter: I've found that some of my sentences use in when I'd prefer them to have at. To me, "in Leeds, WRY" sounds better than "at Leeds, WRY", but with an address, "at 300 Leeds Road" is better than "in 300 Leeds Road". Is there a way to make the preposition follow these preferences?

Currently most of my Addresses are incorporated in the Place field, so I suspect that is creating the problem, or at least adding to it. I'd need to experiment, but would I be right in thinking that changing to Short or Medium place name format (rather than the default Full) would solve this by making everything sound right with in - though at the expense of losing the address elements from the sentence?

Or could the CombineText function work - ie can you use the number of elements in the Place field as one of the parameters? (Although since addresses and place names vary so much, I'm not sure how easy that would be.)

I'm not asking for anyone to spend ages working this out - it was just something I noticed in the Property Box a bit ago. I very rarely produce reports in narrative form, so I'm unlikely to benefit from any solution, and I'm really only asking this out of academic interest.

[tatewise]

I does not matter what you think of as addresses & places, but whether the text is in an Address field or a Place field.
In Templates the following codes apply :-

• {address} yields the Address field and to add the prefix at use < at {address}>
• {place} yields the Place field with the automatic prefix in
• {_place} yields the Place field and to add the prefix at use < at {_place}>

Short and Medium won't help you at all because they simply truncate the Place field at the 1st or 2nd comma respectively, so would just give the first one or two parts of your address within the Place field. Those two qualifiers rely on the conventional 3 part Place format of Town, County, Country but does not work well for other formats, and is partly why the =TextPart(...) function was introduced.

To get the prefix to your liking you would need to use a conditional test of the text in the first few comma separated parts of your Place field. This assumes that you have a fixed number of comma separated parts with the first few dedicated to address and the last few dedicated to place. If the first few parts were empty then use prefix in otherwise use prefix at, but also cater for no Place text at all..
e.g. something like {=TextIf( TextPart(%FACT.PLAC%, 1, 3, TIDY) = "", " in ", " at " )}
I won't actually develop the expression fully since you only expressed academic interest.

This is one of the downsides of combining address & place details into the Place field, perhaps to aid geocoding, but FH cannot tell which is which and get the prefix right automatically.

[tatewise]

Regarding the challenge of getting Family Events such as Marriage to say something like Marriage to John in London on the Facts tab, I have only partial success with the following Template expression:-

Marriage of {=FieldText(GetRecord(%FACT%),'FAM.HUSB>NAME:FIRST')} & {=FieldText(GetRecord(%FACT%),'FAM.WIFE>NAME:FIRST')} {place}

which will yield something like the following for both husband & wife Individual Facts tab & Family Facts tab:-
Marriage of John & Jane in London to Jane JONES

As I said earlier, it is not possible to eliminate the magically added to Jane JONES suffix.

Also that expression only works correctly for heterosexual couples, and NOT same sex or single parent cases.

I tried using contextual refs {%CUR_PRIN%} and {%CUR_PRIN2%} that work fine in Sentence Templates for Family Facts.
BUT only {%CUR_PRIN2%} yields anything, and except by chance, even that is wrong for the Individual and Fact context.
So that is an odd 'bug' that needs reporting.
If it worked correctly as in Sentence Templates, then the following should be OK :-
Marriage to {=FieldText(%CUR_PRIN2%,'INDI.NAME:FIRST')} {place}
BUT would still need a way of inhibiting the magic suffix.

[BillH]

Mike,

Thanks for trying. I tried a few similar things and had the same results. Oh well... I'll just leave it as the default as I'd rather see the correct spouse name than the place.

[arthurk]

Thanks, Mike, for the thoughts re in and at.

Long term I know it would be best to get more consistency in the way I record Places and Addresses, but I'm still pondering the pros and cons of the two approaches. I'm probably leaning more towards separating them out, which would obviously help with this particular issue, but I reserve the right to change my mind before I get round to actually doing it

Thanks again.