Refining an Object selection

Ideas
1

I’m often frustrated by having to drill down through an object Tree in needless repetition. It would be nice to be able to refine a selection instead of discarding it & starting over.

The idea is that… if you need to change a selected Object, the current selection is very likely to be near the new selection. You just need to ‘refine’ the selection

So, removing the currently selected object and re-navigating the Selector for the default top initial position is inefficient. Initializing the Selector with the focus already on the previous selection would save a great deal of re-work.

Two examples:

  1. you add an existing John W. Smith as a father in a relationship. But you fat-finger the double-click & picked ‘Sr.’ instead of “Jr.” Refining Sr. Would re-open the Selector at the same spot and a simple double-click switches to the correct person.

  2. You selected the Place for a marriage Event by drilling down through Nation, Region, County, Municipality. But later, you added a church to the Tree. When you notice the Event with just the Municipality and the Building info as part of the description. (Assume the building is too generic for Search to be a shortcut… like St. John’s Church.) Currently, you remove the Municipality from the place and to that Existing place, Share & re-drill down 5 levels to find the church. Refining would re-focus the selector on the Municipality & you drill-down just 1 level.

A related illogical workflow is related to not having an Object in your tree when adding a record.

Say that you have an event with Township accuracy, you first need to confirm that Township doesn’t already exist. So you Add Existing & drill down to the County level and, sure enough, it doesn’t exist.

You can’t add the Township in the Selector dialog & you can’t clipboard the county from that dialog either. So you Cancel, click the Add Place, type in the Township level detail and then drill back down to the County level in the Enclosing places.

Why not just have an Add icon inside the Selector and have it work just like the Place view Add? That automatically puts the focus Place as the Enclosing Place in a blank new Place form.

Quick & Easy

There is a GEPS proposal


But it seems to need some more exploration. There are easily addressed shortcomings that are not discussed.
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2

It would be like the folder selector in Windows Explorer, you can either click on a new folder icon or right click to add a new folder, even though started out by going to select an existing folder.

So instead of having to chose either one, you would have the choice to both select an existing object or create a new object, regardless of where in the object tree you was…

I have thought about that a lot of times, it’s actually one of the major reasons for me to create that Place database I have mentioned a lot of times… a full hierarchy of places already on place…

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