Event Sources and Attributes

I’m not sure whether to put this is the Help section or Ideas.

In the Person editor window, is it possible to select an event and see if any Sources or Attributes have been entered?

To my shame, I have sometimes failed to enter a source for an event. I know I should be locked in the stocks in the Genealogy town square. But I am trying to fix my wayward past. To that end, it would be helpful when I open a Person editor window to see some indication of whether there is a source attached to each Event or not. Currently, I believe one has to double-click the Event editor at which time the Source Citations tab will be bold or regular font and thus give a visual clue.

I think it would be nice for the Person editor window to, say, at least indicate if there are zero or a number of sources attached to each Event. That is not possible right now, is it?

Also, early on in my Gramps journey, I didn’t understand what Attributes were and how they might be used. Now, I use them fairly regularly but I haven’t gone back to every event I entered in the past and changed how my data is recorded. For example, when I enter a census event now, I’ll record Age and Religion as attributes (either Shared Attributes or in the awkwardly-named Reference Information section). Now, however, when in the Person editor window, I can’t easily tell if I’ve already upgraded my recording of their events or not.

I think it would be great if I could hover my mouse over an Event line in the Person editor and see a concatenated list of the attached Attributes (both Shared and Reference). Again, perhaps this is already a (hidden) feature?

Since I blathering about this, I would suggest that the Main Participants column in a Person’s Events should also be a pop-up list that appears when one hovers the mouse over a certain icon. At the default width, that column is pretty much useless. Eg, if there are 6 or 8 people in a Census event, there is only space to display one. In addition, the current person’s name does not need to appear as a Main Participant. That’s a given since the Event wouldn’t be in his list if he wasn’t some kind of participant.

Thanks,

Craig
(I was today years old when I learned that the Person Editor window shows the person’s age for each event. Somehow, I never scrolled the window far enough to see that info. Is there a way to customize the layout of that window?)

This already exists in the individual editor: the presence or absence of a book icon in the column just before the padlock.
I also sought the opinion of a developer to see if this icon could be clickable and lead to the Events tab of the Combined View, which provides maximum information with minimum clicks.
https://gramps.discourse.group/t/quickest-and-easiest-way-to-start-a-tree/7123/30?u=bjc49
I’m probably repeating myself too, saying this isn’t feasible.

This was my main motivation for writing the Combined View. For any given event, I wanted to see all the event attributes, all the participants and the event attributes for each participant.

A view is a better way of displaying such information. Editors are designed for editing whilst views are designed for viewing information.

I cannot recommend the FamilyTreeView (FTV) add-on enough.
You can configure FTV to show a badge for events without a source citation. A number in the badge shows how many events are missing a citation.

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The FTV by @ztlxltl has implemented a “Badges” approach to dynamically showing such information with numbers, not merely icons.

Perhaps, as @bjc49 suggests, this count value could be included instead a simple Source icon in the Person/Family Editor’s Events tab. (And be added to the Events views as a column.) Then a QuickView (or rollover tooltip) for source citations could make it actionable (or more visible).

This is reminiscent of the “conditional formatting” in the Excel spreadsheet. Oddly, I discovered in Excel that it is often orders of magnitude faster to apply conditional formatting and query the styling than have a column using the same formula in the conditional calculation.

A “calculated” column might also be useful. A calculation might be if the Event has a citation for a specific source. e.g., how many sourced Census Events calculated for the Person?

Yes, this is exactly what I like to see. Rather than adding extra clutter to the editors, we should be coming up with better ways to display information in views.

Maybe we could even consider replacing our default pedigree view with something like this.

3 Likes

Ah, the must be a version 6 thing? I’m still waiting for my distribution to offer 6.

Is Combined View shipped by default in Ver. 6? I know I looked at it a couple of years ago and, as I recall, thought it was not considered ready for everyday use. The wiki page still says:

“This view is intentionally ‘read only’ with no editing controls.”

I read that and didn’t see the point of viewing stuff and having to swap to another view to edit. Now I see that there are edit buttons on pretty much everything and buttons to add new families and whatnot at the top. And when I looked before, I may not even have realized that the tabs for Events, Album and Timeline were there. From my quick look, it didn’t seem to offer that much more than the original Relationships view. My bad for not investigating more.

Craig

I guess I’m old school but I almost never look at the Chart views. I work between the People and Relationships views almost exclusively. A lot of my career was involved crafting spreadsheets to solve one-off needs for specific information. I’m kinda ‘row-oriented’.

Craig

It exists in 5.2.3 version of gramps.

Somewhere, I recall @cdhorn said the experimental CardView leveraged the Combined View code. ( CardView History: “The framework provided by Nick Hall’s Combined View add-on serves as the View Mode underpinnings”)

I got the impression that Nick was happy with where CardView was going and felt free to work elsewhere rather than adding those editing controls.

There’s hope that 6.0 will give Chris the core changes that kept him from moving from experimental to stable.

I recall my apprenticeship:
It must be admitted that the exclusive use of different editors at first is quite daunting and requires keeping in mind the organization of the data in the database.
A beginner needs to see their tree evolve (and control)
That’s why Graphview (+ Quickviews) fulfills this role well with minimal configuration —> this is now how I approach introducing beginners to Gramps software, even though the recommended method is to use the Relationship view.
FTV will undoubtedly be more analytical (sorry, I’ve only installed it once with some issues…), but judging by the screenshots, I miss the immediate visibility of the locations. Is there a search bar as powerful as Graphview’s?
The arrival of FTV, derived from Graphview, and Cardview from Combined View, seems to demonstrate the emergence of Graphical views, without which I would quickly become disoriented. A simple opinion and personal “routine”
A perpetual beginner
P.S.:
Translated by Google Translate, sorry for any misunderstandings.

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