* List of Source Template items? Or an impossibility?

[AdrianBruce]

I really didn't intend to start down the rabbit hole of templated sources just yet, but in adjusting my Generic Source Property Box to something I was more familiar with, it occurred to me that I might be creating major differences compared to the Template Source Property Box. So I added the Miscellaneous Unpublished Document/Artifact template from the Essentials collection's Archived Materials category.

When comparing a templated source record of that sort to an equivalent generic source record, I noticed that there was no Identification / Call Num. / whatever. Easy enough to fix... I just cloned and editted the original Source Template Definition - synched it with the Source Template Record in my project (there you are, I do read the UG and KB!) and there I had a reference item, as desired.

Question 1 - I added my initials to the cloned template name. Is that a good idea or - given that my clone is intended to supersede the "original", would it have been easier to have kept the same name?

Question 2 - in order to decide the name of the Field to add, I just looked in the adjacent Templates and found its equivalent. But what if there had been a lot of Templates, and I'd missed the equivalent? I might have created CallNum or Identification or something else pointlessly different. Is there a means of pulling off a list of template fields / types / descriptions? Or are there so many variants or too few descriptions, that could already hide behind one name, that it's pointless to try?

Cheers

[ColeValleyGirl]

1. I'd rely on the Collection to identify it as a custom template, but I'd also delete the standard template from my project.
2. I'm not aware of any way to do this -- sounds like a task for a plugin. It does make sense to use consistent details for fields in different templates that are doing the smae job.

[Mark1834]

Q1 - I would use the standard name, but save it as a custom template so it doesn’t get blown away when you install the next in-version upgrade.

Q2 - I don’t think there is any way a Query could interrogate templates that are not in your Project, but it would be a fairly short plugin to tabulate all properties of all available template definitions if that is felt to be a worthwhile addition to the toolkit.

[Mark1834]

SNAP!

[AdrianBruce]

Thanks for the advice re STD / STR naming.

The list of template items at the moment isn't huge in the Essentials collection but it will, I'm certain, be huge in the ESM derived collection.

[ColeValleyGirl]

The list of template items at the moment isn't huge in the Essentials collection but it will, I'm certain, be huge in the ESM derived collection.

You're not wrong. I waded through them trying to identify fields that might hold one of a small sets of items (name, place, address, reference, date...). It would be good to have a tool that DEA authors could use to help in crafting data validation.

[Mark1834]

It shouldn’t be much more than bolting together bits from the GEDCOM read and XML write that I did for RM migrants recently, so I’ll have a look at it in the next few days.

[Mark1834]

As expected, most of this plugin was a bolt together of bits from other recent scripts. It tabulates all Source Templates from all available Collections, with one column per item.

To aid comparison between templates (e.g., to look for similarly named fields), all template data fields are listed in the same column. This means the main template details are repeated for each data field. It's not the most elegant display, but the best I can come up with given the constraint of just one output table. It can be viewed and sorted in the FH Query Window as presented, or exported as a CSV file for more detailed slicing and dicing in your spreadsheet of choice.

A simple menu, generated with iup.GetParam, enables the required details to be selected, with my best guess at the most popular options enabled by default. These can always be changed by tweaking the plugin code.

I suspect it will be rather niche in its application, but it's available as part of the toolbox as required.

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[ColeValleyGirl]

Mark, that is going to be really useful for authors of DEAs when they're trying to cater for multiple source templates! Thank you.

One suggestion: could the Name in the results column be made into a link to the Template?

[Mark1834]

It's a list of available template definitions, not template records in the current project, so not sure that would work.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Ah, OK. Forget that then.

[AdrianBruce]

Well, whaddya know, there's 344 unique items in the ESM collection.

That's not as bad as the time I did the analysis for the BetterGEDCOM initiative. Someone had already done the hard work of turning her stuff into a spreadsheet and I just had to work on the XLS to come up with a unique list. There were, at that point, in the high 600s. (And yes, I did merge a few that appeared similar, such as "Author" and "Authorsname", say, and ended up with 666 items. By whimsical design, I must say, rather than a serious analysis which could have brought the numbers down more.)

Thanks Mark.

[ColeValleyGirl]

This guy stopped at the 170 Quick Check models and I cant say I blame him! (I used it as a source for some work in GenQuiry and for my own templates for the Create Source from Template plugin).

[Mark1834]

It's interesting how the different apps have interpreted EE to best fit with their own structure. The Advanced collection in FH has 1400 data fields in total, none of which are citation level. By comparison, the larger RootsMagic built-in template collection (which is available separately on the web from a user group, and I used for testing) has 6592 data fields, of which 30% are citation level data. RM is based on traditional database technology, so handles lumped sources much better than FH, which is restricted by GEDCOM limitations. FH Essentials is somewhat of a compromise between the two extremes, 140 data fields, of which 7% are citation level.

I didn't count them - Excel import and filters .

[AdrianBruce]

This guy stopped at the 170 Quick Check models ...

That might well be the XLS that worked its way through to the BetterGEDCOM initiative - it's the right era and roughly, vaguely, looks a familiar format. I'll not bother recounting - I had enough problems trying to remember how to hack the XLS that I got from Mark's plug-in. Converting a CSV into an XLS? Then what did I do to remove dupes? Rusty at all those things. Not to mention the fact that this was the first Excel 365 spreadsheet that I'd written...