Dumping the options used to export a report from the UI

Repeating a configuration a Report is one purpose of the ‘Book’ feature.

The typical use is to create a collation of reports that you would want to run for versioning (as the same person’s data changes) over time or to create a standard packet of reports you want to generate for different people.

But it can be used to store a custom configuration of a single report. I just posted a question about customizing the text report “Detailed Descendant Book” to make a National Genealogical Society style report. It gets most of the way there with configuring options.

Saving a Named Book for each Report may be a worthwhile as a ‘Standard Practice’. Gramps remembers the last reconfiguration of options for each report. With the interaction of an extensive number of configuration options, it is easy to become lost during experimentation. But there’s no Reset to Default. So you could use Books as a way to create a ‘Restore Point’.

(No volunteer developer has pursued adding a Configuration Reset or something like a CSS Editor style GUI for configuration Restore Points. The Experimental CardView add-on has a 1st cut at a Configuration management system… but it is limited to configuring its set of Category view modes.)

Since none of the configuration items have an editing GUI, I currently have a (somewhat convoluted) workaround. It is to have a dummy person (named "Gramps \GENEALOGY') with a gallery of Media opjects that are various .ini and .xml configuration text files with Note 2ndry objects (organized by attaching to each Media object, not the dummy person) that are copies of those files. Since the OS has ‘helper applications’ configured to open those file types for editing, I can simply ‘View’ the Media object in the Gramps Gallery and the Helper Application will open the file. I can flush the entire contents of a configuration file (or just a chunk) to reset to defaults. Or use the Note as a scratchpad to overwrite the file contents or chunk. After saving the changes, it is necessary to restart Gramps since it is unclear when (or whether) Gramps reloads the edited Configuration file.