Update to UK1921 Form

[SteveY]

I’ve created a PR to update the UK 1921 England census form which can be found here

The printed form has an AGE column which is split into two sub-columns, years and months. The current gramps form has a single Age column, meaning the user has to create their own encoding. For example if the person is given as 10 years and 3 months old, possible encodings include: “10y3m”, “10y 3m”, “10.3”, “10 3”. The PR updates the gramps form definition to have two columns, “Age” and “Age Months”, allowing direct transcription of the form.

For backwards compatibility reasons, the existing gramps form AGE column attribute is kept as-is. A new column “AGE months” is added to transcribe the months value from the printed form. When a pre-existing form is displayed in gramps the existing string, as entered by the user, will be displayed in the AGE column and the “Age months” column will be empty

I could not think of a way to 100% reliably split the existing Age value into the years and months components. I’m happy to look at this again if someone has an idea.

[emyoulation]

Seems like such variants on the “Age” expression would be a good expansion for the Date Calculator. (Doug notes that this gramplet uses the same date parser as other plugins.)

Then the form could leverage that with a Birth date “calculated” guess (if missing) when enter Census data.

A while back (2021), I submitted a Feature Enhancement request revised labels for that gramplet to give clues during data entry. I wasn’t confident enough to submit a PR and the addon owner (@dsblank ) was taking a sabatical from Gramps. So that request is marooned.

[SteveY]

I’d not spotted the widget before. It looks useful.
I’ve created a PR with your ideas and others contained in Feature Enhancement request revised labels for that gramplet

Date Calculator Enhancements by stevenyoungs · Pull Request #621 · gramps-project/addons-source

Perhaps it would be nice to have a “date calculator” button beside every date entry widget - similar to the advanced date editor that we already have? It could display a dialog similar to the Date Calculator gramplet. The advantage is that it would be built in.

[emyoulation]

@SteveY

Perhaps it would be nice to have a “date calculator” button beside every date entry widget - similar to the advanced date editor that we already have?

Or add a calculator and a Calendar button to Advanced Date Editor to that feeds the selected Event/Citation date (or Today, when blank) into the dialog?

5.1 Calendar. (5.2 has localized day-of-week labels to disambiguate Sun-Sat vs Mon-Sun layouts)

It is another click/dialog deeper … but enhancing would only require changing one dialog.

Or the date calaculator and calendar could be tabs at the bottom of the advanced date editor?

Being able to fetch the date would improve on a Calendar widget weakness: its year < and > controls only move by a single year. So scrolling back decades or centuries is agonizing.

[SteveY]

To support the dual dated capability of a gramps date, I think we need to be able to invoke the calendar \ date calculator from two places, highlighted yellow in this mock-up

whether it is to the right of the Date label, as highlighted, or in line with the Year\Month\Day widgets can be debated. Likewise, it could be 2 buttons to allow separate invocation of the calendar widget or a date calculator dialog.
Does the calendar widget support non-Gregorian calendars? If not, we’d need to think what the behaviour should be in that scenario.

Your post did also trigger the thought that the Date Calculator gramplet would benefit from using the standard gramps DateEntry widget. It needs a bit more work still. Currently it visually indicates that an offset is an error. Even if the calculation still works correctly, it is a poor user experience. The image below shows this.