Sometimes It Works … But Not Always - Sat, 6 Jun 2015

Didn’t quite make my self-imposed May 31 deadline. It was a busy week.

I also got caught up in the attempt to add one last improvement into this version. I just can’t help myself. Yes, I know it’s better to get the version out first and then add the improvements later. But as I came to a screenshot I was going to be including in the documentation, I felt a slight need to standardize and improve the data presentation..

So I thought about the structure I have assembled. If you take a look at the information for each event for a person being presented, I’ve set it up to look like this (with the indentation as shown):

Person
      Event: Date Place
            Event-details  
            Source, Analysis

An example of this is:

Here you have several event details: The wife’s name and age. A photo, and the source of the marriage information along with its assessed quality and data from the the record,  which could as well have included an analysis of the source record.

Good! Now for the Place Details section, why not flip around the Person and the Place, and include the same information, like this:

Place 
      Event: Date 
            Person  
                  Event-details
                  Source, Analysis                  

And an example would be:

I’m sure that One-Place studiers are especially going to love the presentation of the data this way. Everything is there, organized by place and then by date.

So I thought I’d do the same thing with the sources. Simply in a similar manner, flip the Source with the Person in the first structure and get something like this:

Source 
      Event: Date Place 
            Person, Analysis 
                    Event-details

It seemed correct. And it contained everything like I hoped it would. But something just wasn’t quite right.

After I played with it for a while, I realized what the problem was.

In the first example ordered by person, all the event information was associated with the person. In the second example ordered by place, all the event information was associated with the place.

But in this case, ordered by Source, not all the information is associated with the source. That other-event-info (in this case the picture) is associated with the marriage event for the person, but it is not associated with the source. That additional information could include other notes or even other sources.

The picture would need its own source information if it is to be assigned to the source.

So I relented and realized that in the Source Details, I could only have this structure:

Source 
      Event: Date Place 
            Person
                 Analysis

and it looks like this:

So the image I had of presenting complete event information under the Person, the Place, and under the Source, just didn’t quite pan out. But this is the best you can do.

At the end of this, I did change the Place Details to the expanded structure, so it was a worthwhile diversion. This was something I had in my future plans for version 1.5, so that’s now done.

Still finishing off the Version 1.1 documentation. Doing this has been a really good audit that everything’s working and the way I want it. But now I’m hoping this will have been the last diversion before releasing 1.1.