* Charting Companion plugin

[Klaus Yde]

I have just bought the Charting Companion, and it has made a plugin in my FH. But the only thing it seems to do is starting the Charting Companion in a separate window. But no data is sent into the Charting Companion - it just asks for a file. Of cause i can load it with a gedcom file - but then what use is the plugin. I had expected it had taken my marked persons from FH including pictures?

I havent found any usefull help in Progenys guide or faq

At the moment i am somewhat disapointed.

Kind regards

Klaus Yde

[Jane]

You will need to contact Progeny as the plug in is theirs and not one from the store.

[tatewise]

I do not use Charting Companion but that is all the Plugin is designed to do.

You must upload a GEDCOM file to create any charts.

See glossary:charting_companion|> Glossary > Charting Companion and how_to:charting_companion|> Charting Companion for further details.

[Klaus Yde]

Jane. Ok. As it has been discussed here several times before and has been bought from FHs store. I had excpected a little more help..........

[Klaus Yde]

Mike. Then i dont understand why they have made it.

[Jane]

Which is why I recommended asking Progeny. If Charting companion is capable of taking command line parameters they could change the plugin to pass in the File name and current selected person fairly easily, but if Charting companion can not they would need to change CC to do so.

[Ron Melby]

open a file, put the file name there get its namelist
choose your name and let er buck.

you have to choose a file, because in FH, there can be more than one, although I suppose you could modify the plugin to choose the file you are in without huge difficulty.

https://www.progenygenealogy.com/Portal ... ads/cc.pdf

[mjashby]

Old thread update.

For me, using the standard Charting Companion plugin does automatically load the GEDCOM from the project currently open. Unfortunately that is the limit of its current 'intelligence', as it always loads the file with the focus on the first Individual entered, i.e. ID1

This is the full text of the plugin for anyone interested:

fhInitialise(1,0,0, "save_recommended")
f = '"'..fhGetContextInfo("CI_GEDCOM_FILE")..'"'
tblIndi = fhGetCurrentRecordSel('INDI')
if #tblIndi > 0 then
f = f.." /SI"..fhGetRecordId(tblIndi[1])
end
fhShellExecute("C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Charting Companion\\cc.exe", f, "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Charting Companion\\", "open", 9)

I can understand the plugin being limited in nature as the developer may only have a limited knowledge of Lua scripting and this application (and others produced by the company) are developed commercially to work directly with the data files of a significant number of Family History applications as well as GEDCOM. They apparently started with a free FTM Plugin feature (don't know what its capabilities are) and only seem to have added the free plugin for FH when it was added to the Family Historian Store as a "companion product", at a significant discount. This leads me to wonder if the text might have been provided by Calico Pie as a basic launcher. Of course, if someone was to enhance the plugin's capabilities the developer might well be interested in incorporating improvements in a future update to their distribution.

Mervyn

[tatewise]

I very much doubt if the Plugin script was provided by Calico Pie because the first statement is very unusual.

fhInitialise(1,0,0, "save_recommended") says a save is recommended and the minimum FH Version required is 1.0.0 which never existed and Plugins are only supported from 5.0.0 onwards. I also suspect it is in the default FH V6 coding of UTF-8 so will not even run in V5, so it should be fhInitialise(6,0,0, "save_recommended")
Calico Pie would not make such a mistake.

It is also very easy to modify the Plugin to use the currently selected Individual &/or prompt for an Individual.
Is that what you would like to be able to do?
The changes can be made in a companion Plugin so the distributed version is left alone.

[Klaus Yde]

That would be nice. That was what i had expected of the plugin.

[tatewise]

On closer inspection, that existing Plugin should use whatever current Individual record is preselected.

So select the Individual you want to be in focus and run the Plugin.

Does that invoke Charting Companion with that Individual in focus?

[Klaus Yde]

It always take person nr 1.

[tatewise]

The parameter that the Plugin sends to Charting companion takes the form:
"C:\Users\...\Family Historian Projects\Project\Project.fh_data\Project.ged" /SI99
where the first component is the GEDCOM file path, and the final digits are the Record Id (99 in this case).
So it seems as if Charting Companion is ignoring the /SI99 Record Id and defaulting to 1.

Unless anyone has any Charting Companion documentation that explains its command line parameters, anything we try would be just guesswork.

Alternatively, somebody with Charting Companion could ask their Support team for help.