* Help on editing templates

[wigansaint]

I have worked through tutorial for adding marriage information but have a problem with the auto text. The county name (Surrey) does not appear on the 3rd line as it should i.e

......at Parish Church in the parish
of Newton in the county of (Surrey not showing as it should))

I have tried to edit the template so it does appear but have been unsuccessful. Can someone offer guidance please.

[tatewise]

The tutorial says: "On the 3rd line enter the County of Surrey..." because the Template cannot pick out the County so it must be entered by you.

Some of the Templates (such as the one you mention) try to imitate actual Certificates, but are not able to automatically extract all the relevant details, which you must supply by hand.

In fact this is the general case with Templates. They extract information automatically from details entered elsewhere, but this may not match exactly what appears on the document. So if you want an accurate transcript it will almost always need manual editing. This in particular applies to names of Individuals that are derived from the FH database, but which in real documents are often different, especially in Census Returns.

[NickWalker]

Hi

The first 3 lines of the template I assume you are referring to looks like this:

Certified Copy of an Entry of Marriage
{YEAR}, Marriage solemnized at {ADDR} in the Parish
of {PLACE.SHORT} in the County of

The template doesn't fill in the County of .... because there isn't really a way for it to know which part of the 'place' contains the county. The {PLACE.SHORT} picks out the first part of the place up to the comma but you might have recorded your place as (for example):
Stockton Heath, Warrington, Cheshire, England
or Stockton Heath, Cheshire
or Stockton Heath, Warrington, Cheshire
etc.
and so AS has no idea which bit of that is the county (in a future version I could perhaps include a 'database' of counties for it to compare against).

As with all the templates you select all the data in the main part of the form and the auto-text makes an attempt to get something similar to the original source but you'll almost always need to edit this source text yourself to make it an accurate transcription before saving the record. Putting the county on the end of that line is an example of this.

I hope that makes sense

Nick

[mjashby]

Nick,

I would avoid the idea of a "database of counties" if I were in your position. Whilst it might at first appear potentially useful, you would probably create as many issues for users and yourself as you would solve, i.e what if the user has used Yorkshire or Yorkshire (West Riding) as the County name, but the certificate quotes "County of York". Then add to that the issues of "County of Lancaster", "County of Southampton", "County of London" etc., etc.; and you have a recipe for some very complex possibilities.

Mervyn

[wigansaint]

Thanks for the replies.

Message to self "Read everything before making fool of yourself"

[tatewise]

Not at all, there is often a lot to digest, and we are here to help you up the learning curve.

[NickWalker]

I would avoid the idea of a "database of counties" if I were in your position. Whilst it might at first appear potentially useful, you would probably create as many issues for users and yourself as you would solve, i.e what if the user has used Yorkshire or Yorkshire (West Riding) as the County name, but the certificate quotes "County of York". Then add to that the issues of "County of Lancaster", "County of Southampton", "County of London" etc., etc.; and you have a recipe for some very complex possibilities.

If, for example, there was an template key word such as {PLACE.COUNTY} then this could look to see if there was a match in the county list for any of the 'columns' (i.e. between commas) of the place specified. Assuming this is a UK source, in most cases there would be a match but if there wasn't it would simply leave this blank so the user would need to enter this themselves into the source text, which is exactly the scenario currently. So for most sources it would save a little time, occasionally it wouldn't so would take as long as it does now. I can't see a downside to this for the user. I'd allow the user to add to the list of counties themselves and could also potentially have an option for AS to say 'I couldn't find a county in the place specified' and allow the user to select the column that specifies the county which would then be added to the county list. I think this would resolve the concerns you have, and of course I could include 'County of York', etc. in the default list of counties anyway. An even more flexible solution would be to have users able to create their own adhoc lists for American states, etc. (assuming they weren't supplied with AS too).

Of course the real down-side to this is the amount of time it would take me to develop compared to the relatively minor time-saving benefits this would bring to users!

[mjashby]

Nick,

Yes, a 'drop-down list facility' for core UK County data that could be added to/edited by individual users might well be helpful, particularly to those facing the input of a large volume of data, but the core datafile for certificate input would need to comprise the County names in the style of those I mentioned earlier, which most researchers probably don't use for any other purpose than accurately recording the content of official documents such as certificates, Probate documents etc., rather than old/new administrative County names which aren't normally used in legal and/or ecclesiastical documents until comparatively recently. Alternatively, you might consider starting with the provision of an empty datafile, with direct editing capabilities, that users would be responsible for populating prior to and/or during certificate input, therefore avoiding the potential inclusion of large volumes of redundant/unnecessary data.

Enabling the same datafile to cope with non-UK based data would introduce some added complexity because of the varying administrative levels in other countries, but I think I'll leave it to you to mull over the possibilities and potential implications of that one.

Mervyn