On the Theme of Census and improvements that could be made to Forms

I currently use the Reference: field on the Forms Census to create the citation by copying from a spreadsheet the pro-forma
“PRO Ref RG09 Piece 2878 Folio 139 Page 42” which is for the UK 1861 Census and then putting in the correct values

This could be improved in a number of ways.

  1. All items listed are Attributes under the Headings Section of the Form so the Reference/Citation could be constructed by
    “PRO Ref” + Census ID + Folio + Page.
  2. The custom.xml file could have added in the header
which could be updated and then saved 3)Reference: could become a combo box with a number of pre-formatted selections.

Notes
I currently in the Details section I add a notes field for each individual which I find useful for the likes of the 1939 register the surname of a female who later marries or to refer to the number of closed records.
However it would be better if the there was a proper Notes section
eg Details, Headings, Gallery, Notes which would allow the creation of an event Note such that you could record none related individuals resident on the night of a census without creating individuals who are not connected genetically.
phil

This idea expands on pull request #265 which added a template for the reference field.

Forms are currently being worked on by @rentheroot. She may have something like this already planned.

1 Like

Nick

Remember looking at this years ago and forgot to follow up to see if
anything had happened will do so now
@renroots has commented that it does not impact on what she is doing
phil

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@comeng with PR #265 applied the default Reference for a new UK1861 form looks like this

You just need to complete the Piece, Folio, Page and Schedule fields in the Reference template.
The template is specified in the form definition, using the reference attribute.
<form id='UK1861' type='Census' title='1861 England and Wales Census' date='1861-04-07' reference='Department: RG, Series: 9, Piece: , Folio: , Page: , Schedule: '>

so can vary for each form. Here’s the UK1939 form:

I’ve provided templates for several UK forms. I’m happy to help create a PR to update other forms if someone has knowledge of what the Reference template should look like.

Steve

Thanks very much for all your efforts on this I will be implementing
over the next few days.
I have been using Forms for many years and have heavily customised mine
and I only use custom.xml so will adjust there accordingly
Please keep up your good work and once again thanks
phil

I am having an issue with this
I have copied into the Plugins/Form directory edit.py and editform.py deleting the the old versions but when I try to edit my custom.xml file I am getting a grampletbar.py error with regard to page orientation.
This is on a Raspberry Pi 5 running the latest os
Any thoughts please
phil

8531: ERROR: grampsapp.py: line 188: Unhandled exception
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gramps/gui/widgets/grampletbar.py”, line 478, in __page_added
gramplet.set_orientation(self.orientation)
File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gramps/gui/widgets/grampletbar.py”, line 693, in set_orientation
self.pui.set_orientation(orientation)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘set_orientation’
Forgot system info
GRAMPS: 5.2.3
Python: 3.11.2
BSDDB: 6.2.9 (5, 3, 28)
sqlite: 3.40.1 (2.6.0)
LANG: en_GB.UTF-8
OS: Linux
Distribution: 6.6.62+rpt-rpi-2712

Solved stupid typo on my part apologies
phil