8 replies to this topic

[MarvinP]

I have a possible refresh problem with Quickgroups.

 

After dong a Tools > Problem Search > Problem List, I get a list of people.  From this Problems List I can click Edit Person (or double click on a name) which brings up the Edit Person dialog. 

 

The "Groups" button now appears on this dialog, which I can click on and bring up the QuickGroups dialog.  Down at the bottom of this dialog is the link to "Manage groups", which I click on.

 

At this point I can create a NEW group and give it a name.  I don't need to select any people and simply click on the OK button at the bottom.  This brings up the "Enter name for the group" dialog.  I put in some name like "A Problem Group: and click ok and then Close.  My new group shows as a new group in the QuickGroups dialog box.  Click OK to return to the Edit Person that is waiting from the Problems List.

 

You can add a few more people to the new QuickGroup by double clicking on the Problem List dialog. 

 

Now for the problem (and answer)..

Close the Problem List and get back to the main program.  Click on the Group Icon and the dropdown that does NOT show this newly created group name.  This seems to be a problem as I've added a few people to this QuickGroup already. 

 

The answer seems to be that going to the Named Groups dialog again and closing it will refresh the Groups Dropdown and now show the new group.  You can also click on the toolbar and EDIT and chose QuickGroups and then OK which will also regenerate the newly created group.

 

It looks like the code was left out, to rebuild the new list of Groups for the Dropdown when in the middle of the Problems List dialog. 

 

I hope this is a very small bug and easy to fix.

 

 

 

 

[Renee Zamora]

I can confirm what you are seeing with QuickGroups. 

 

If you create a group by clicking on the Manage Group link at the bottom of the QuickGroup screen it will not appear in the Groups sidebar drop down list. You need to click the Groups icon and bring up the Named Group (Manage Group) screen to make it appear. Once you look at that list the Group name will appear in the Sidebar drop down list.

 

If you go to Search>Named Groups>Display Group or Manage Group it will then refresh the sidebar Group drop down list.

 

So this is basically a refresh issue on the sidebar panel drop down list. I have reported this to development. 

[geogenie]

Thank you for that workaround. I was going nuts trying to figure out why my people were not staying in the groups I just created. I created a new group from the sidebar instead of the right click menu on the person. That worked!

[GJohn]

I might be able to expose a few more details on this bug/problem for the RM8 developers so it doesn't get imported from RM7.

I encountered this problem recently before I knew about the Groups refresh describe in a post above, using SQLite I examined the GroupTable & LabelTable, and what I found was several groups were unintentionally sharing the same lists of persons.

Basically as described in this thread & others on this problem, my example's background is I went through several cycles without a refresh of creating multiple groups in the same session and populating, often losing those entries or getting other ones when examining using the Group sidebar, deleting Groups and repeating in steps in a slightly different order, trying to figure out what was going on. I then went to SQLite and found this snapshot in my data:
* LabelTable had 9 rows, with 9 unique text LabelName as expected, but only 6 unique LabelValue numbers when expecting 9, where three rows with unique LabelName's shared the same number in LabelValue, and another two rows with unique LabelName's shared the same number in LabelValue.
* GroupTable upon examination I found in the the GroupID column only 6 unique numbers, the same set of 6 unique numbers found above.

With a forum search I found out about the refresh (Search>Named Groups>Display Group or Manage Group) which doesn't solve the problem but is a work-around I now use religiously with all new  Groups I create. BUT ....
In my database, post-refresh, several of the corrupt Groups were still corrupted. The only way I found to fix my corrupted Groups was to completely delete ALL the corrupt groups and then re-create them with lots of refreshes. Unfortunately many of my corrupted groups were manually populated (lost time & effort).
With the RM user interface I identified the corrupt groups (after a refresh) using the Group sidebar to examine each group's members visually to identify if any of the lists were identical (using SQLite quickly the corrupt Groups were obvious to identify examining LabelTable, but I know not everyone is SQLite literate).

At this point I want RM8 released desperately and all your resources applied to that, and for RootsMagic as a product & company to become top genealogy software once again, but ...
As a longtime s/w dev. professional (among other things) I was shocked to see this bug's temporary work-around history goes back to 2016. Everyone knows contrary to best efforts occasionally bugs slip past Quality into production deliveries, especially after major releases, but customers expect them to be fixed in the near future.
What about all the confused RM newbies over the last 4 years since who simply quit using the Groups feature not knowing what was going on? I was a RM newbie less than 3 years ago who discovered it was obviously buggy, after purchase & import; I avoided using Groups until recently now that I need that feature.
Or those non-tech genealogist who expect software to work out-of-the-box, encounters the problem, checks the program's internal Help that doesn't mention the bug or work-around, without knowing they have to also searching the online forum?
Or the genealogy software annual reviewer who sees this bug and gives a product a poor review, especially one as mature as RM7?
Thankfully Groups are not included in RM Essential feature list to scare away potential new customers?

[Jerry Bryan]

Not just to solve the groups problem, but after RM8 is out the door and stable I really hope there is a renewed commitment to quality in RM in the fullest sense of the word - not just commitment to flashy features. By quality, I mean functionality that's fully fleshed out, bugs that are fixed in a timely manner, problems that get solutions rather than workarounds, etc.

 

RM is like nearly all genealogy software companies in being really small. When you are really small, development and maintenance resources are very limited and finite. If the emphasis is on one thing, everything else has to suffer a bit. That's not a bad thing nor a criticism. It's just a reality. But I think that RM's quality has suffered for too long and too much in the chase for too many features. Quality needs to become a much higher priority after RM8 is out the door and stable.

 

Jerry

[Vyger]

Not just to solve the groups problem, but after RM8 is out the door and stable I really hope there is a renewed commitment to quality in RM in the fullest sense of the word - not just commitment to flashy features. By quality, I mean functionality that's fully fleshed out, bugs that are fixed in a timely manner, problems that get solutions rather than workarounds, etc.

 

RM is like nearly all genealogy software companies in being really small. When you are really small, development and maintenance resources are very limited and finite. If the emphasis is on one thing, everything else has to suffer a bit. That's not a bad thing nor a criticism. It's just a reality. But I think that RM's quality has suffered for too long and too much in the chase for too many features. Quality needs to become a much higher priority after RM8 is out the door and stable.

 

Jerry

 

I totally agree, I believe Rootsmagic Inc is at the foot of the mountain looking up rather than being at the peak looking for the next peak and challenge, I do wish them well for the future. There have been many side issues along the development road and features I would have avoided rather than accept endless responsibility to chase changing API's, specifically Save to Google and Dropbox, RM does not need to facilitate this. Treeshare took quite a chunk out of development time and I only hope it has proved worth it in terms of sales and popularity.

 

The video teases have shown some promising new approaches but until users get to try them for themselves we will have to wait and see how they work in practice. I am very sure there will be gaps in functionality where one will get so far down a path to ask themselved "why can't I... ?" those are the items Rootsmagic need to close out and act on very quickly with very frequent updates in the months following release.

 

It's been well expressed in the previous two posts and I agree quality must be foremost in the future, it's not acceptable to expect users to accept workarounds and that attitude must change, If my vehicle door doesn't open I will only climb in through the trunk once so I can get it to the dealers, I'm not going to adapt to a faulty vehicle.

 

As regards enhancements I'm not sure where my expectations are anymore, the Mac development has been a major challenge, the new UI has also been a considerable task. Regardless what I would term power users have been wishing and discussing improvements for many years so the genuine needs and desires should be well known by now.

[TomH]

Aren't there two issues being conflated here?

One is the original post about not refreshing as it should, an issue not only for Quick Groups but also for some other areas.

A second one introduced by GJohn is corruption of a group or groups by a certain user procedure. Is this not now known to be caused by creating a group with no members (and possibly by deleting all the members)?

They are separate issues.

[GJohn]

I was not clear, apologies, frustrated when I wrote the original post after wasting a lot of time on this when I was trying to actually be a RM program user. Finding it was a known issue and 4yo took my frustration a step further, adding the editorial.

I retested Groups to duplicate the DB corruption, monitoring the SQLite GroupTable & LabelTable, and Sidebar display contents.

I confidently agree with TomH there are two distinct s/w problems:
1) When you create 2+ empty groups at once, then populate them afterwards, in the same Manage Groups session, those groups are corrupt, specifically they all share the same list.

Further odd display behavior ensues to confuse a user.

There are likely other combinations with empty groups that cause this problem, I will leave that to RM.
2) The Sidebar display does not refresh after adding a person to a group.

I systematically retested Groups this morning to duplicate the DB corruption of 1), monitoring the SQLite GroupTable & LabelTable values

First Problem 1), initially, a few 'good' groups existed GA, GB. GC & Gshr, as a control group for comparison, Gshr containing all the member of GA-GB-GC.
Sidebar Select Group tab
Click icon add-modify-delete named group >
New > select empty > OK  > name MilSrvc
New > select empty > OK  > name CivilWar
(GroupTable & LabelTable values corrupt at this point, MilSrvc & CivilWar share same LabelValue, groups that existed before this are still ok)
New > select empty > OK  > name WWI
New > select empty > OK  > name WWII
(now al four groups MilSrvc, CivilWar, WWI & WWII all share same LabelValue)
Select CivilWar > Edit > select person A, B, C manually > OK
Select WWI > Edit > select person D, E manually > OK
Select WWII > Edit > select person F, G, H manually > OK
(At this point persons A-H are in all a GroupTable list using the same GroupID/LabelValue, and all four lists MilSrvc, CivilWar, WWI & WWII also share that LabelValue, the per-existing groups GA, GB. GC & Gshr unchanged & correct.
Now that several of these groups share one list, odd RM behavior on screens involving groups, especially without a Groups refresh, caused misleading display info, no need to describe in detail IMO because explainable by corrupted tables, even makes sense now that I know how what their content is.)

Next Problem 2)
Sidebar Select Group tab > pull down selected group GA.
Dbl-click on Edit Person for person Z, someone not in group GA (known good) or WWI (known bad) (in this case I use the Pedigree tab, but likely same with Family, etc.)
Click Groups icon
Select groups GA & WWI > OK
Close Edit Person screen for person Z
Visually examine sidebar (Sidebar Group still displays GA with the old list, no person Z, incorrect)
Select another group from pull-down, then re-select GA

Visually examine sidebar (now the display for GA is correct with the new person Z and all the original persons)
Select WWI
Visually examine sidebar (with no person Z, incorrect, but no surprise since group values were previously compromised)

Combine these two issues, and the unaware user like myself several days ago gets confused quickly, repeating group & member add/mod/del compounds the odd behavior & displays.

[TomH]

I retested Groups to duplicate the DB corruption, monitoring the SQLite GroupTable & LabelTable, and Sidebar display contents.

I confidently agree with TomH there are two distinct s/w problems:
1) When you create 2+ empty groups at once, then populate them afterwards, in the same Manage Groups session, those groups are corrupt, specifically they all share the same list.
Further odd display behavior ensues to confuse a user.
There are likely other combinations with empty groups that cause this problem, I will leave that to RM.
2) The Sidebar display does not refresh after adding a person to a group.

You are to be commended for your thorough testing and reporting. You should be a Beta Tester for RM8 and maybe that would ensure that these two bugs are eliminated in it!