Rumble, rumble … - Sat, 20 Nov 2010

As you may have noticed, there has not been much happening on this blog in the last month, and the last Beta of Behold was released onSeptember 6. I haven’t vanished. I’ve been here and working hard (other than a week’s vacation) and ran into my recursive link roadblock again.

If you search this blog for the word “recursive”, you’ll find I have been trying to get this right since 2005. About a month ago, I took 3 different stabs at it before I realized there’s something not quite right here. I had to determine what was going on because it would make a difference as to how I might have to modify my datastructures.

The considerations were

1. When an individual has a relationship to another individual, Behold displays the information both ways, for both individuals. If that info contains a source, that source must be repeated.
2. If a source contains a note, and the note contains a source, then you don’t list the second source in the first, unless its a note that only occurs once, in which it is added into the original source.

Surprisingly, these were not my real problem. I had these handled and working fine. But there were complications when it came to building up the references to these links, and trying to decide which ones were referenced and need to be displayed and which should be hidden.

Then I found over the last few weeks, that I also want to add the date and place to the link reference so they could be displayed in the Source listing.

And I also realized I wanted to group identical references together, so that when you have 5 people who witnessed a birth with identical detail and sources, Behold doesn’t have to display it 5 times.

Okay, I finally think I’ve got how to do it, and it will take a small change to the internal Behold data structure. Hopefully I can get it implemented soon, and then go on and finish everything else up for Version 1. (I sound like a broken record a bit, but that’s unfortunately the way it is).

At least the current Beta available is quite stable. There was no rush to replace it.

And I’ll have to update my expected dates again. Doesn’t look like I can get Version 1.0 out by September 2010, does it?

But … rumble, rumble … something’s finally happening. I’ll try to report my progress more often on this blog to help motivate myself.