Unless I’m mistaken, what is found in reference to certain objects can be the most interesting part in certain contexts, and yet their content is neglected by Gramps.
Let me explain.
Citations, notes or attributes included in references to events or media associated with a person refer directly to that person in the context of that event or media, like a note about that person during such event or a citation indicating why in a group photo a certain person was cut out, rather than the one next to him/her, to associate it with their profile photo. The same goes for media associated with a source, a citation or a place. I’m probably forgetting some that also have references to another object.
However, none of these categories of objects have a filter for their reference content - even with Supertool you have to make convolutions to access them, they don’t have their own proxy - or a report containing the information found there, the gedcom export does not include them. Etc.
They are rather neglected. I manage with Supertool to retrieve the content of these references but if we had tools directly implemented in Gramps like filters allowing us to search them or reports including their information (there is the Dynamic Web Report which takes care of this but it is too heavy to use this data on a daily basis) that would be a good point.
If Nick or Kari or each Gramps developer could put this need on their wish list that would be nice.
Are you speaking of the rows in the References tab of Object Editor?
That, when dragged to the clipboard, References tab records appear in the pattern ‘Person ref’. (But which are missing a Context menu on the Clipboard. )
Very nice idea but no, it’s not what I mean. I’m actually talking about reference to the event or to the media in their editor from the people, families, citations, etc, editors.
The term “reference” is overloaded in Gramps, and it means different things in different contexts (backlinks, “References” labeled Gramplet and Tabs, reference type Clipboard objects, and the term ‘reference’ has connotations for programmers and database designers. too.).
Could you clarify what the original post is talking about, without using “reference” or adding a qualifier for the type of reference?
Are you talking about a new matched set of Rules that are related to References?
Would it need a set of Rules to search for <object> or Link (from notes) type backlinks?
There isn’t a way to use a Rule that is cross-category. (e.g., a rule that finds any object that References a filtered set of objects) And even a Quick view only looks up a single object. So one that looks up references for a filtered set of objects would have to be a Report.
The existing reference-related Rules are all “quantity” oriented:
In another thread, @GBaynes is currently making a similar point. There are no Rules to find Notes that are secondary objects (or tertiary objects) of a Person, Family, etc.
So the problem goes in both directions… it is hard to get an amalgamated list of objects that are referencing something as a secondary object. And equally difficult to get an amalgamated list of secondary objects. And both of those lists would be good to feed into other filters.
This might be one of the reasons that @dsblank test floated a query language addon. I wonder if the idea might have been to have something more flexible than a toolkit of hard-coded specialty queries?
Because you could spend the rest of your life creating new rules. Then building thousands of Custom Filters that leverage just a few dozen rules.
