Monday, April 25, 2005 - Mon, 25 Apr 2005

All that the Everything Report currently shows is only two of the top level structures from the GEDCOM. Those are the: INDI (individual) and FAM (family) structures. What I needed to code were the others: HEAD (header), NOTE, OBJE (multimedia), REPO (repository), SOUR (source), SUBN (submission) and SUBM (submitter). I was able to take my basic coding for handling and storing INDI and FAM records and apply that to all the others at once, creating a STRUCTURE0 record that would have the additional attribute which would be the type of structure. By handling all these the same way, the coding is simple and it will ensure that everything works consistently. It will also allow any and all other types of structures that may have been customized by some programs to be handled as well.

The only structure slightly different is the NOTE structure. Normally, most programs handle notes inline with the INDI, FAM, and other structures. But GEDCOM does allow a NOTE structure that can be referenced from the other structures with a link, e.g. 2 NOTE @N14@ will refer to the 0 @N14@ NOTE definition. This structure is slightly different because it can have its NOTE text on the definition line, so I have to handle that as well.

The other thing about the NOTE structure is that most programs only refer to each note once, since they are usually person-specific. But some programs allow multiple references to a single NOTE, e.g. “0 @N56@ NOTE Has brown eyes.” might be referenced by a number of people. Thinking about it (in the shower again), I may insert singly-referenced notes inline where they are referenced in the Everything report, and place multiply-referenced notes with the Sources and rename that section: “Multiple References and Sources”. I thing that will work out quite well.

A couple of asides: (1) There is an interesting new organization tool that won an EWeek excellence award called GoBinder by Agilix. I then took a look at my copy of Surfulater again, which I hadn’t used in a while. The latter has had several new versions since I last looked and many good enhancements, some of which I had suggested to the author.

(2) I’ve been getting a bit frustrated with the free RSS reader I use: SharpReader. The author has made no improvements in a year and a half and it can crash my Windows 98 system when I run certain programs at the same time it runs. I’ve switched over to Feedreader which is still not up to SharpReader in features and user interface, but it is free, is Open Source (and written in Delphi!), and it has been very active in issuing new releases with fixes and improvements. If you are looking for a free RSS reader to read this Blog’s RSS feed or Behold’s Discussion Forum feed, then my current recommendation is Feedreader.