Export filters - GEDCOM - exporting given number of generations/jumps around a specific person

I have exported (not using Gramps) hundreds of thousands of people to GEDCOM. Did that really by mistake - I just wanted people close to my family, but I set amount of jumps too high.

So I imported that to Gramps, and now I want to filter the database - leave only people which are relatively close, ie. 20 jumps from me.

Gramps allows me to export only people which are in any way linked to selected person - that’s good, but in my case it doesn’t crop the database enough - only few entries are removed.

Is there a way to do filtering based on amount of jumps during export?
Maybe there is a way to remove unnecessary entries from the database, without exporting?

(Gramps 5.1.4)

Here’s an add-on filter rule “People Separated less than <n> degrees of <Home person>”. Another rule lets you choose a different person as the base.

1 Like

Welcome

I would create a multi part filter.

Filter 1:
Ancestors of <person>

You can limit the number of generations by using Ancestors of <person> not more than <N> generations away

Filter 2:
Descendants of <filter> match
People matching the <filter>
Options: At least one rule must apply

Set the filters to Filter 1. You add the first filter back in to make sure the oldest grandparents are included. They are not their own descendants.

Filter 3:
Souses of <filter> match using filter 2

Filter 4:
People matching the <filter> using filter 2
People matching the <filter> using filter 3
Options: At least one rule must apply

You can expand filter 4 to include more of the in-law family members by adding these rules:
Parents of <filter> match using filter 3
Siblings of <filter> match using filter 3
Spouses of <filter> match using filter 3
Children of <filter> match using filter 3

You actually run Filter 4. This is a positive filter, returning people that match the rules. To find people that do not meet these rules check the box Return values that do not match the filter rules in Filter 4. Depending on the number of people they could be deleted.

Or create an export of the positive filter using the Gramps (xml) non-media option. When you get to the filtering, put in Filter 4 for the people filter and in the Reference Filter: use Do Not include records not linked to a selected person. This will return just what the people in the filter need excluding everything else.

Then you can create a new Gramps database to import the file you just created.

Thank you, I appreciate your fast and precise answers.

…but I rage quit Gramps for now. The programmers failed on too many fronts.

Translations of the tool are bad - every line is translated differently in every place. I didn’t even realized there are so many ways to write “Plugin manager” in Polish language. And other things are translated in a way which is technically correct, but makes it very hard to find any option based on English name.

It took me way too much time to finally make sure the “Plugin manager” option was what I was seeing in help (translated “Zarządca Pluginów” instead of “Menedżer pluginów”), but then it turned out that’s useless as the ‘managing’ is only disabling or enabling already installed plugins. No idea why “installing plugins/addons” has links to info on that window if it is not related to installation.

And the wiki on add-ons:
https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/5.1_Addons
on first look it seem to comprehensively explain how to install the add-ons, but no idea how it went from “9. […] You can now optionally select”
to
“10. From the Available Gramps Updates for Addons window”
I don’t have any window, no matter whether I do the optional click or not. No idea how this window is supposed to ‘materialize’. This is not how you write a proper documentation.

Even in English the terms used change… are there add-ons or plugins? Are some plugins called add-ons, or some add-ons called plugins? Or are these two completely separate things?

Anyway, sorry for the rant. And thank you for your help, I will probably get back to it at some point.

Got back to it much faster than expected.

So another issue which should be handled is that “check for updated add-ons” uses something external to do the checking - for me, that was cut by a firewall. So most of the time Gramps contacts the internet from its own process, but in that specific place it seem to do something different? I guess that matches the general theme - lack of consistency.

I was finally able to install the “People Separated less than N degrees…” plugin, and use it in export. It’s still working ATM, but I think that will do the trick.

Do you mean “contacts its own registered ‘gramps-project.org’ hosted domain” rather than “contacts the internet from its own process”?

Then that’s right… the Addons list & archive is hosted on a different server than the wiki. And the main download is on another. As is the Maillist. And the main site is a patchwork of WordPress, MediaWiki, MantisBT, Discourse, Sphinx & other tools. Plus there are third-party archive of other add-ons, videos, support communities & research projects.

Gramps is a crowd-powered project by unpaid, fully autonomous volunteers. Contributors work on what motivates them and do so without an indoctrination into programming styles or a boss micro-managing their production.

You’re going to continue to be disappointed if you demand regimented design and ordered implemention as an absolute requirement. Volunteer projects just don’t work that way.

(In my experience, not even team-based commercial software can achieve that. There are gifted maverick programmers in most projects continually bucking the system. Only one-man projects have a single vision… but they rarely have the manpower to address oversights and errors.)

The sooner you become open to diversity (and even learn to seek out oddities as opportunities that can be leveraged), the more likely that your frustration will be relieved. Don’t expect Gramps to suddenly change.

1 Like

On a Windows system, I’ve added Gramps binary to a list of “allowed” - it can contact whichever domain it wants. But that isn’t enough to make the update list file go through the Windows Firewall (default policy is - block).

So I what meant is - the ‘gramps’ process running on my machine is able to access the Internet, but I am still not able to receive the list of updates, unless I disable it completely. This draws me to a conclusion that the download happens in another process.

Being crowd-powered - How do I edit the wiki? I don’t think I have the will to make it right, but could at least fix the most pressing inconsistencies as they appear.

Vision of one person is consistent - that is definitely NOT what I meant. Actually, such visions are the source of many problems similar to those I described.

A vision of one person could be that “plugin manager” will only enable or disable plugins. If he/she asked someone else for opinion, I’m pretty sure the conclusion would be that “plugin manager” needs to do what it does in other projects - be that all the Internet browsers, or even open-source projects based on similar engines, like Quantum GIS. In all of these, “plugin manager” installs, uninstalls and configures plugins, not only disables/enables them. The current window should be called “plugin enabler” or “plugin state”.

I understand this is the solution we have now, and improvements will come if someone feels motivated enough. I was commenting on “single vision” being something different than “vision of one person”.

Actually I just noticed that translations are in the standard ‘.po’ files, maybe I will find some time to look at them…

There are those of us that have been working on cleaning the wiki for years. More volunteers would be welcome.

You can sign up to be a WikiContributor. The login link [in the header of every page] was removed recently due to robot attacks. But there is another link on the sign-ups page too.

The host domain for the catalog peer reviewed add-ons is listed on the General tab of your Preferences in the Where to check field. The .tgz files linked in the wiki Addons list Ind8cate that most of the downloads are in https://github.com/gramps-project/addons/

In addition, the Isotammi project has a set of Gramps add-ons created to support their project but useful for the wider Gramps community. Their add-on catalog is at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Taapeli/isotammi-addons/master/addons/gramps51 and that catalog has the paths to their downloads. (Naturally, on their own server.)

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.