Children are not in order of birth

[WilliamV]

v.5.1.6-1 on Windows 10

Hello,
When I generate a family lines graph under the report tab, children are not displayed in order of birth. It seems that they are displayed in the order of creation on Gramps. I changed the ID number in hope of a better result , to no avail.
Please help,
Kindly,
William

[emyoulation]

Looks like the report doesn’t consider the children’s family order when building the graph. It just uses the natural (creation) order. Maybe someone can suggest a hack for making the loop sort the children on their family order in the for childref in the link the children to the family section?

See lines 831-835 and 1158-1171 for where it gathers information for the children.

Plugin name: Family Lines Graph [Report]
Id: familylines_graph
Description: Produces family line graphs using Graphviz.
Version: 1.0
Authors: Stephane Charette
Filename: gvfamilylines.py
Linux install Location: /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/gramps/plugins/graph

[pgerlier]

This graph is created in a two-step process:

1. the selected persons (and family) are output as a GraphViz description (a graph language enumerating the “nodes”, i.e. persons and families, and the “oriented edges”, i.e. the relationships between persons and families)
2. the graph description is transformed into a graph by GraphViz
   GraphViz tries to minimise edge crossing and will move the nodes to achieve this goal

Considering point 2. above, listing the persons in some order is not guaranteed to keep this order during graph drawing. I once tried to introduce manually constraints in the gv description in order to group people into “clusters” (sub-family lines) and all I got was a worse-looking graph.

Constraints is the gv language are not trivial and their semantics is not the same as what genealogists expect. I resigned myself to live with the automatic GraphViz placement.

You can improve slightly your graph by including birth/death dates. It does not fully replace proper ordering but you can read the information if needed (but once again it could be of low value if a child is moved rather far away from siblings because of marriage with a partner in a parallel line drawn at the other end of the sheet).