I sympathise with your request.
As you say, there are a great many
Qualifiers for
Name and
Date fields, but only
SHORT,
MEDIUM,
TIDY &
FULL for
Place fields, and none at all for
Address fields.
In mitigation, I suspect the explanation is that
Name and
Date fields have a rigid structure that everyone must use, whereas
Place and
Address fields have simply a variable number of commas.
The concept of
PART1,
PART2,
PART3, etc, is good but only works well if users adopt a fixed number of columns.
I did in fact suggested something similar to Simon Orde of Calico Pie in May 2013:
Place Blanks, Columns & Qualifiers Ref: [#229528]
The Place field supports up to 10 columns, and allows any column to be <blank>.
The Qualifiers SHORT, MEDIUM and TIDY remove any extra commas following a <blank>.
Many users have assigned columns such as District , City , State , Country for example.
If the 1st or 2nd column is <blank> then the Qualifiers SHORT and MEDIUM misbehave.
e.g.
The default display for MEDIUM Qualifier is District , City
If District is <blank> the MEDIUM display is City , State
If City is <blank> then the MEDIUM display is District , State
If both are <blank> then the MEDIUM display is State , Country
All very inconsistent, if the same parts of the Place field are required.
This comes about because the <blank> commas are removed before removing trailing columns.
Furthermore, if a user has many columns the existing Qualifiers are of limited use.
So an alternative approach could be to offer new Qualifiers such as COL1, COL2, COL3, et seq to COL10.
These could be used like %INDI.BIRT.PLAC:COL2:COL3:COL9% to display any columns in any order.
Any <blank> columns, and trailing commas, would be automatically removed as the last process.
Alternatively, perhaps a Function might be better than multiple Qualifiers.
e.g.
=Columns( %INDI.BIRT.PLAC%, 2, 3, 9 )
where the variable number of parameters define the column numbers and their order.
The same Function could be applied to the Address field, or any other text field with comma separators.
e.g.
=Columns( %INDI.BIRT.ADDR%, 2, 3, 9 )
His reply was:
I saw the discussion between you and Pedro about this on the
FHU Mailing List. I think you both make an important point and we need to provide better support for allowing users to control the display of place information more flexibly. I have logged your suggestions for our ToDo list.
I think something along those lines is a good idea. There are a number of issues relating to places, even over and above the ones you've raised, and we need to look at how best to address all of them. I suspect we'll need at least one extra function (such as the one you suggest) and perhaps some new qualifiers too (e.g. possibly one or more 'custom' qualifiers which the user could configure themselves in Preferences). There are various options.
However, I am not aware of any proposed changes to FH along those lines.
FH is light-years ahead of it in pretty much every other regard.
