Monday, October 17, 2005 - Mon, 17 Oct 2005

I decided to implement the suggestion by rwcrooks to have an option to show the Structure/Source and Substructure/Citation name next to the reference links.

I had always thought of the references as the equivalent of those superscript numbers put on the lines on which they apply. In Behold I show them between square brackets as: [R12] or [S15-8]. But once I added structure Titles and saw how useful they are, it became clear to me that this option would be very worthwhile in certain situations where you have a lot of different sources and citations.

However I have seen some GEDCOMs which have hundreds of events referring to only a few sources and citations. This is especially troublesome in cases where a lot of data was loaded in from another GEDCOM and the source was automatically assigned during the load (and by now, everyone must know my feelings about doing this).

So this would be a useful option to have. It only took me a couple of days to implement. Believe it or not, the hardest part was struggling with how to allow the selection of this option by the user. I finally decided to make two menu items and two corresponding toolbar items that would allow toggling between short references and long references.

After I implemented this, I ran it on a few test cases and it pointed out a couple of other problems which I was then able to fix. So already I’ve made use of it.