Ordering of tags

Ideas
1

Hi,

please apologize if I have chosen the wrong category. I am not sure if this is a real feature request, as I believe my issue can be easily solved. Therefore, I did not create a feature request.

My tree is structured into genalogical sub-units, e.g. 1. Tree, 1.1 Branch a, 1.2 Branch b, 1.1.1 Leave a etc.

I recently discovered the convenience of “tags” in gramps to associate individuals to those entities (and I really like the way the tags are colorfully displayed in grampsweb, this really helps to match the displayed person at a glance to a certain part of the tree).

Each individual is tagged with multiple labels following the entire tree hierarchy so that e.g. the progenitor is tagged “Tree a”. He has two sons, each of them creates a new branch:

“Son 1” is tagged “Tree a” and “Branch a”

"Son 2” is tagged “Tree a” and “Branch b” and so forth.

My issue now is, that gramps orders the tags in alphabetical order and the way that the tags are displayed in the person view is: “Branch b”, “Tree” (because “B” comes before “T” in the alphabet).

To overcome this issue, I numbered the tags before the name and hoped that this would affect the ordering:“1-Tree a”, “2-Branch a”, “3-Leave a”, etc.”, but the tags are still ordered in alphabetical order. Of course, I could put a letter instead a number at the beginning, e.g. “A Tree”, “B Branch”, “C Leave” etc. but I find numbers more intuitive for a hierarchical system.

Do you think there is a way to solve this (easily)?

Happy to hear what you think.

2

You can do this without artificially modifying your tag labels.

In the main view (the one with the menu bar), there is a Tags icon in the toolbar below the menu bar. Click on it, then choose Organize tags from the pop-up menu.

You can now reorder your tags anyway you like.

When a record has several tags, the first one met (from top to bottom) wins colouring in the lists.

That said, I am not sure that your procedure is the “right” way to go. Gramps provides attributes and tags. In my understanding, attributes are related to genealogical facts or data while tags are preferentially related to the “status” of your research.

In other words, attributes complement information from events, persons, families, … in a machine-processable way (vs. notes). They belong closely to the record you attribute.

Tags would rather give information on the “quality” of the database globally.

Best is to give examples.

  1. Your description looks like d’Aboville numbering
    There are however severe limitations to this scheme. It is relative to a given ancestor (the root). Due to pedigree collapse, the same person mey have two or more d’Aboville numbers. And this forwards to the descendants.

    Consequently, I’d rather use attributes (yes, plural) named something like Spawn X where “X” is the name or alias for the root ancestor and the value is the number. Thus you can assign several different attributes to the same person to give its number relative to various roots.

    Unfortunately, I don’t know how to handle pedigree collapses. Perhaps by defining the person as a new root.

  2. My use of tags
    I have created tags check, new, partial, lapse, restricted, no posterity (in this order of precedence) with their own colours.
    Check is set when I have a doubt about contents or confidence, requiring check of the sources.
    New flags a new record (I only have the name or the fact it is a “family”).
    Partial tells me I only know part of the story (missing birth or death, missing “marriage” or children not exhaustive, …).
    Lapse results from lost or destroyed archives (no hope to find data).
    Restricted is used on recent data when law restricts access to official records.
    No posterity is not really a “status tag”. I use it to make names or families gray for bachelors and “families” without children. This spares me anyway the pain to look for descendants.

  3. Showing sub-trees explicitly
    I consider Gramps as an entry tool. I find it not practical as a browsing tool to explore my research. I prefer to generate a NarrativeWeb site to display more “comfortably” my tree because each page is a synthesis about a person, family, place, … grouping many records (Person, Family, Event, Citation, …) in a single location.

    I added to my NarrativeWeb Family Lines graph reports which I customise to include links to person and family pages so that a click on a “node” jumps to the corresponding page. Since I also use these graphs to grasp a global idea about the status of the DB, I modified the generator to add tag-coloured borders around the nodes.

    With such a strategy, I can have several partial generation-limited views of my data.

3

Thank you, that was an easy one :face_with_peeking_eye:

I re-ordered the tags as you suggested and they appear now in my preferred order, at least in Gramps Desktop. The order has not been updated in Gramps Web after synchronisation, however. But I’ll try around to solve this.

Thank you also for proposing “attributes”, I haven’t used them so far. I’ll have to experiment with them. For the moment I am quite happy with the tags and the way I can use them (e.g. as filters) and the color scheme in gramps web, especially as they are displayed prominently in the person’s view. I really like it his way.

The use of branches and leaves in my tree is rather new, so I am still experimenting around and happy for better usage of the power of gramps.