(Please include your Gramps version and Operating System
GRAMPS: 5.1.3; Mac Version 10.15.7
Text reports using US Census attributes entered in the Forms add on include the line “Order: 1”.
I need to suppress that printing or remove the attribute “Order” from the list of Census attributes that appear in the Census Event window.
The attribute does not appear in the definitions in <plugins/Form/form_us.xml>. I am puzzled about its source.
Regards, Elvin Birth
I enter all members of a household in the Forms gramplet creating a shared event for all of those people.
The Order attribute indicates the order in which the people are sorted in the gramplet. So if you enter the people in the same order they occur on the census page, the attribute indicates the order in which they are found on the original census form.
I suspect the gramplet would fail if you used it to open an existing census event if you remove the attribute, although you could remove the attribute in the event editor after using the gramplet to create the event.
It may appear useless if there is only one family member in the household, or for pre-1850 census records, but I do find it useful for most situations.
I don’t know whether it is possible to suppress printing it in reports.
Allen Crider
I also enter all members of a household in the order shown on the Census form, but the value of the attribute “Order” is always 1.
In any case, I do not want it - especially in reports.
Regards, Elvin Birth
I do not use the Form gramplet, but…
Try the Type Cleanup tool. It will scan your entire database and list all custom Type entries. Under the Event Attribute section should be the custom type “Order”. You can remove all instances of the attribute.
This will need to be a regular task as you continue to use the Form gramplet.
The alternative is to find where in its code the Form gramplet creates the attribute. My quick scan of the code showed many instances where ORDER_ATTR appeared in the code.
You can also edit the form, or create your own form with a different name, by following the instructions here.
Are you opening the Forms gramplet and adding each person from the household using either the add person or share person button on the Details tab? Or are you opening the gramplet separately for each person? Using the first approach, I get different values for the Order attribute for each person in the household.
However, the reports I use most frequently are the Narrated and Dynamic web reports, and while I had not paid close attention previously, I just realized that they don’t include the Order attribute in the list of attributes associated with a census event (although I don’t know why).
It might be possible to find other reports that handle it the same way or modify some reports to have the same behavior.
I will try the Type Cleanup tool.
Editing the Form Gramplet code is, for me, an extreme last resort.
I open the Forms Gramplet separately for each person. It is apparent that the Gramplet is intended for family records and I may be misusing it.
Yes, it’s easy to make mistakes when writing XML. I don’t use forms myself, but a useful new feature for those who do would be an interface for creating them. (After all, custom filters are also saved as XML, but that’s invisible to users.)
To remove the Order attribute, it would take a modification of the code itself. It is hard coded and not a part of the various xml files. Apparently the attribute is set Private so for many reports it will not display.
As I said, I do not use the gramplet so even though I know the basics of what it does, I have never spent any time learning to use it.
I wouldn’t say you are misusing it but you are not using it the way it was intended. As far as I am concerned, as long as you are satisfied with the way you are doing things, it is not misuse.
But sometimes there are ways to use it that may be better.
Among the advantages of using the Forms gramplet for everyone in a household that is in your database (not necessarily a family) is that you get a shared event with a common citation and shared attributes for the header data so you don’t have to re-enter the common data. In at least some reports, that makes it more obvious who was living in the same household at the time the census was taken.
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