22 replies to this topic

[NEreswearcher]

Thanks Tom and Jerry,

 

Ok, I apologize for that, I couldn't resist the Disney connection.

 

Tom your points are well taken and I will do a lot of testing before attempting to modify real projects. One thing, it has been awhile since I worked extensively with SQL, should I do an insert from my FactType database first and then the update, vice versa, or is there a combined way to do both?

 

Jerry I completely missed that fact that if I customize an individual fact for a person the it will need to be stored somewhere else. I am working to get rid of all such individual modifications.

 

TMG was a very powerful product when it comes to output. TMG had some other things that I wish products like RM and GEDCOM would adopt. Topic for another time. When you say tightly coupled do you mean that I can customize a sentence and actually hard code a person's name in the sentence? That never entered my mind as I want all sentences to be generic for anyone in my database and I use fields like Date, Place, PlaceDetails, Description and Notes to make any sentence output unique to a fact/event so sentence structures take a bit more thought to get them to work with anyone in any situation. My sentences will not win any literary awards but at least it will  easier to read/ I would want my sentences to work with all your data as well. I'm sure that my sentences would not meet your goals but at least I would get reasonable output.

 

One further complaint about RM. All my notes are rendered outside of any footnote and therefore are not sourced. It would be great if RM provided a way to include the notes as part of the fact or use notes as an un-sourced piece of information. Again a topic for another time.

[Jerry Bryan]

I was doing things like putting the head of household reference for census events as hard-coded text in sentence templates customized for a specific individual. That certainly is not going to transfer anywhere. Better would have been a [HeadOfHousehold] role using RM's shared sentences so that each individual person would not have to have a customized sentence template, but that also is unlikely to transfer very many places. Using a census note to indicate head of household is clunky and old school, but it is likely to transfer. On the other hand, there is no real link in the note between this person and the head of household that can be indexed and that sort of thing.

 

You are correct that notes are not sourced in RM - a major problem for me. Also, dates and places cannot be sourced separately, and often my source for a date is totally separate and independent of my source for a place for the same event. For example, a headstone inscription might have a birth date and a death certificate for the person's child might have the birth place.

 

Jerry

[TomH]

SQLite has this command:
INSERT OR REPLACE... which would update records matching the key or append new non-matching records.