Monday, October 24, 2005 - Mon, 24 Oct 2005

I reached a stumbling point while working to generalize the INDI and FAM references. The way I had set them up initially would not work in all cases. It took me a while to get my head around this problem. I looked at dozens of different GEDCOM test files and I had to spend time working through the GEDCOM 5.5.1 standard to find all the Tags involved (including substructure of FAMC and FAMS, ASSO and its RELA subtag, and the custom WITN tag and its ROLE subtag.) I concluded that the Source/Subsource basic structure that I’ve already developed will still work, with only a few changes.

Now to see if I can implement this quickly. This fix is actually really important, since it will eliminate many customizations that I made to initially get the FAMC and FAMS substructures working. Future enhancements will therefore be much easier.

I do want to ensure that there is no more basic functionality to include before switching to Beta testing prior to the release of 1.0. It am amazed at how very different the GEDCOM structures are that different programs produce. The challenge, and I think I’m almost there, is to be able to handle them all.