An attempt to transfer non-intellectual mechanical actions to scripts when adding new records

Ideas
1

I just want understand how difficult is it to implement such idea.
Maybe also it could be implemented something like supertool with ability to build custom forms manually and then write logic for it. You can say that this is impossible (too difficult) or maybe you will see any great feature here, which make Gramps using extremely productive. Really this is my dream to have such form because now one record in documents takes about 15-20 minutes of my time. I have thousands of such records. I think each of you feels something similar if you work with a lot of data. For example I will show how looks usual Metric document with marriages.

Screenshot from 2024-04-02 08-03-06
Screenshot from 2024-04-02 08-03-061311Ă—571 94.6 KB

For each such record I do the same mechanical actions which could be fully automated:

  1. Find all 6 people in the database and create all them is missing
  2. Create a new family
  3. Calculate ages of bride and groom and set birth date as calculated
  4. Add Residence event with year and place for all 6 people if places are available
  5. Add Marriage event to family with Citation, date, place
  6. Move Marriage event to all 4 witnesses and set Role as “Witness for”
  7. Move first 2 witnesses to the bride Associations with Citation and description “Witness for”
  8. Move second 2 witnesses to the groom Associations with Citation and description “Witness for”
    I also do some another things like recalculate deaths ranges, add Caste attribute and so on… But now it’s not about that.

Almost all of steps above could be automated except first 1-2 steps I think.
So, It would be great create a form like this:

1 (2)
1 (2)721Ă—401 62.9 KB

What about such and similar forms for most popular documents? metrics (birth, marriage, death), another church records… ? Is it possible mage something like forms builder? It would be great have something similar in Gramps. What do you think about it? Possible/impossible? Maybe all this will come up with new ideas for improving productivity to minimize mechanical work.

Maybe it also gives some interesting and perspective ideas for future 5.3 release.

1 Like
2

The easiest way to do this would be to enhance the existing Forms addon.

We already have marriage forms like this, but at present they only allow you to transcribe a source. Only one event is created per form and the information from the transcription is stored in event and event reference attributes.

This could be enhanced by adding type information into the existing XML form definitions. Then we could generate extra events or associations automatically as required.

For example, a witness section in a form could look like this:

<section role='Witness' type='multi' title='Witnesses'>
    <column>
        <_attribute>Name</_attribute>
    </column>
    <column type='Residence'>
        <_attribute>Place</_attribute>
    </column>
</section>

We could use the type='Residence' to indicate that residence event should be generated.

1 Like
3

I will try to find out how it works.
Does this addon provide for creating NEW custom forms? Or maybe only modify the EXISTING ones?

4

Users are encouraged to create their own forms. Useful forms can be submitted for distribution. We have a maintainer for each country.

5

So, it sounds good, If there is possible to add not only xml, but some businesslogic also. But I think it is possible, othervise this addon would be too limited in its capabilities.
But I think I will need some help to implement my idea - it looks not so trivial for me as I dont work with python.

maintainer - sorry, what (or who) is it? )))

6

We have people who volunteer to check new submitted forms for their country.

At the moment we can only enter transcription information. The next step would be to enhance the XML and add some generic business logic.

I can help if you are interested in developing this further.

1 Like
7

Sure! Lets start from entering of transcription information.