Saturday, June 28, 2003 - Sat, 28 Jun 2003

For the past three weeks, I’ve been having a real tough time. I had got to the point where I’m setting up the Numbering Options. I had designed the page some time ago, and it was well thought out … but the implementation of it is not so easy. The reason was that I designed it to be very flexible and allow a number of different organization methods. But doing so also made it complicated - complicated enough to make it difficult to explain and most likely difficult for a user to understand, not to mention difficult to implement.

I’ve tried over the last three weeks to rework my ideas and clarify them and determine what was important and what was not. I think I’ve finally settled on what might be best. The real goal is to let Behold produce the report organized in different ways that the user wants. If I go over everything right here in my Blog, it should help me to solidify my thoughts.

Basically, Behold presents the Everything Report with the people organized into “Families”. Normally, a family is made up of all relatives of a specific person or of multiple people. This type of family is given an IDs and is specified on the Families Organize Page. But a “Family” can also be defined by all people with ancestors having a common ancestral surname (e.g., for a surname study). And you can also include families from different GEDCOMs. These three definitions: GEDCOM, Family and Surname can all be included in the ID if so desired. And either their sequential number or ID can be used in the numbering in any order. The order also drives the ordering in the Everything Report. Different families can have the same ID, meaning they will be treated as one if their numbering is not used. It is complicated even more by ideas that Families withing GEDCOMs should probably be renumbered, whereas the GEDCOM specified as detail for the family should not.

Then for each family, there are different ways the branches of that family can be specified and numbered.

Finally, for each branch of the family, the descendants can be ordered or listed in different ways, and yet another numbering can be used for this.

See how complicated this sounds. Coming up with something that is simple yet robust is not easy.