I am working with my cousin in Slovakia to build a family database. I am new to GRAMPS and not great at computer inner workings. Is there an easy way to explain how I could give access to the information that I have entered to my Slovak cousin? Ideally, we could both work on the database to build & correct our family tree.
GrampsAIO64-5.1.3-2; Windows 10
Gramps are not really designed for this.
I dont think its possible to edit it at the same time, but if you make sure only one acutally use it at the same time, it might be possible.
It IS designed as a single user database.
But there have been many discussions of how to work beyond this original specification. (Including the Import and Merge Tool or the work being done on collaborative tools by the Isotammi group.)
But I think we were thrown aback by your asking for any ‘easy to explain’ solution for collaboration. All the workarounds have been convoluted and require rigorous attention.
Hi,
a possible workaround is to put your database in a cloud and grant access to your cousin.
(I personnaly have my database in Dropbox so I can access it from different computers).
But it will only work if you use the same version of gramps and you do not access it at the same time.
Ever since the posting was made about the ‘Betty’ project
I’ve wondered if that might not be a step towards a read-only reference sharing. If a website used an unmodified XML backup from Gramps… rather than importing (or converting to webpages), then there would be more opportunities to try building collaborative workflows.
For instance, the XML file could be linked to be downloadable as well as feed the website database engine. So, a collaborator could periodically download the freshest published copy, Import/Merge it and send back the resolved update. Then the site administrator could import/merge to validate the changes. Cumbersome but possible.
Or, perhaps Gramps site could have a curated Change/Suggestion system… similar to FindAGrave. The change system would be similar to the way Gramps works now… with record Editor screens. Except each valid Transaction would have to be approved rather than unconditionally committed.
Betty, or any static site generator for that matter, can include any data based on the original you want. Pratically speaking, Betty can include the original Gramps file with very little effort, but it wouldn’t have any of the loaders applied to it, which means that privatization, anonymization, and clean-up will be done to the data before the HTML pages and JSON files for the HTTP API are generated, but not to the hosted Gramps file. For that to happen, we’d need a conversion back from the internal data structure to Gramps. Until now, Betty has been parsing Gramps XML, but if we can get our hands on Gramps’ API documentation and/or some documentation that explains how to read and write Gramps file formats, we could clean up Betty’s Gramps loader and fairly trivially allow privatized and anonymized data to be dumped back to Gramps files, and then hosted.
I’ve been eyeing adding direct GEDCOM support to Betty as well (currently any GEDCOM files must be converted to Gramps files using Gramps itself, then loaded into Betty), both to make it easier to generate sites as well as sharing family trees. I noticed Gramps uses its own GEDCOM parser/dumper. If that’s of a higher quality than some of the other libraries out there, it would be extremely useful to have that available as a separate package on PyPI.
// Edit: Conversion from Betty’s data structure to Gramps would be lossy, though. The first losses occur because right now not all of Gramps’ data is supported by Betty (Betty doesn’t do sex/gender, for example, because it hasn’t been needed and it’s somewhat complex to get right). Then when converting from Betty’s data structure to Gramps, additional losses occur (Betty supports an arbitrary number of parents and doesn’t have the concept of a family as an entity type binding persons together, for example). But yes, once we manage to leverage Gramps’ Python API for reading and writing files, we can at least provide conversions for the common denominators.
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Links that mention Gramps API’s hope they help you?
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Thanks for considering and answering my request. It seems that I will not get the easy, simple way to share my data that I hoped for.
If its really important for you, you might want to look in to some alternative for gramps, there are some that allow collaboration work without being the Ancecstry and stuff, but dont remember their name.
An alternative that require more work on your part is for example you create a wepage of your gramps data, then the other person looks at that and if that person want to add something, writes things down in a text editor and files and you have to put it in from that.
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