* Historical Place Names - How to create a Query that recognizes the date of places?

[psinacio]

I am standardizing my places by their historical names.
Eg.
-Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1379–1815)
-Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1815–1918)
-Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1918–1933)

And I would like to create a query resulting in a list of occurrences with a given location and a given date period.
Than I could use Find and Replace to correct the place description in this resulting list of events.

Eg. I would search for all entries where location "*,*, Mecklenburg-Schwerin," have a date from 1815 to 1918, so that I can change the location name from "Mecklenburg-Schwerin" to "Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin"

Any suggestions?

[tatewise]

The best type of Query will be a Fact query so that you can test %FACT.PLAC% and %FACT.DATE%

However, the biggest problem you have is overlapping dates.
1379-1815 overlaps with 1815-1918 and that overlaps with 1918-1953
So you need a specific date in of those years to act as the watersheds.

Then your Query Rows tab filter can test for:
Exclude unless %FACT.DATE% was later than 1st date
Exclude unless %FACT.DATE% was earlier than 2nd date
Exclude unless =ContainsText( %FACT.PLAC%, "Mecklenburg-Schwerin" )

However, it won't be easy to Find and Replace just that list of facts except manually one by one.

Tip: Create the three new Place records for the three year ranges beforehand.

[psinacio]

Hi Tate,

thanks for sharing the tips.
It has worked perfectly regarding generating the list of facts that match both conditions.

However, as you said, now I cannot change it so easily.....

Doing it manually will take ages..

[tatewise]

The only technique for automating that process is with a Plugin.
So this is your motivation to learn how to write Plugins, especially if you have other historical place name corrections in mind.

[psinacio]

I do have a lot of other historical place name corrections in mind.
Is there any posts or guides on how to create plugins? like this one base on queries?

[tatewise]

The FHUG KnowledgeBase has a section on Plugins and under Writing Plugins start with Getting Started Writing Plugins.
That has cross-references to some tutorials in the FH How to Write Plugins Help pages.

When you have experimented with them, I'm sure you will have some questions.

I have moved this posting to the Plugins Discussions forum.