Family Historian User Group

Mike,

Last year you wrote me a plugin called Merge Citation Text From Source into Note. I used this and it worked great. I took a look to see if I could make a clone that would move the citation Entry Date into the source field, but couldn't figure out how to do that.

Before I knew any better I created a lot of citations with entry dates where I misused the entry date field. I'd like to get rid of those entry dates without losing the data they contain.

Is it possible to put the a label of "Date of letter: " followed by the actual entry date in the first line of the note followed by a blank line?

Bill

Yes, that is possible.
The complication you discovered is that Date fields have a special date format rather than plain text.

Please confirm that you want every Citation Entry Date moved as requested to the Citation Note.

Also, must the moved Date cope with possible existing text in the Citation Note field?

Mike,

Yes, it is beyond my programming ability I think.

Yes, I was hoping to move every citation entry date to the citation note field. I only used entry date for a short time early on in my research and I used it incorrectly.

It would need to handle the case of existing text in the note field. I was hoping to be able to move it to the beginning of the note so it would like like this after the move:

Date of letter: moved_entry_date
blank line
existing text in note if there is any

Thanks!
Bill

Why do you say that is incorrect use?
I am guessing the Source Document is a letter providing genealogical details.
The Entry Date would appear to be the date the letter was written.
That is what Entry Date is designed for; to hold the date the Source Document was created.
GEDCOM says: "The date that this event data was entered into the original source document."
It is an indication of how contemporaneous the event was to the document.
i.e. Was the information entered into the document soon after the event, or many years later.

I am happy to write the Plugin if you are still keen to go ahead with the move.

Mike,

I wasn't sure about the correct use statement I made. In any case, at this point I am no longer using the entry date field and it is confusing to have data there for these old citations.

While I have hundreds of citations they all cite the same source (back then I wasn't a splitter). I'm starting to think that maybe I should really create about 15 or 20 new sources for the letters and include the date information in those sources. I would then have to replace the current citations with new ones pointing to the new sources. I can easily create named lists of the facts that have each date in the entry date field. If I did that, would there be a way to "easily" change the citation on these facts from the one "lumped" source to the new "split" sources?

So, hold off on working on a new plugin until I can figure out if I can create new sources and swap the old ones for the new ones "easily".

Thanks,
Bill

To "easily" change citations from the one "lumped" source to new "split" sources needs some unique data in each citation that can be used to identify which "split" source the citation belongs to.
e.g.
If each Entry Date is unique and that Date appears somewhere in the "split" source (albeit as text) then a Plugin can link the citation(s) with that Entry Date to the "split" source containing the matching Date.

Mike,

First let me say that I was incorrect in my first posting in this thread. I was writing from memory rather than actually looking at the records. The sources were emails rather than letters.

I have a quite a few facts that are linked to a "lumped" sources called Email from firstname lastname. Each citation has a date in the Entry Date field.

I have created new "split" sources called Email from firstname lastname - date where date is the same as the entry date in the Entry Date field of the citations.

So I guess ideally the plugin would find the citations with a specified date in the entry date field and change the citation to link to the corresponding new "split" source with the same date in its name.

If this is hard to do in a plugin, I wouldn't want to have you spend a lot of time on it. I could do them manually. I was just thinking there might be an easy way or an existing plugin that could be easily modified.

Thanks,
Bill

As you can guess I am quite busy with FH V7 beta just now.
So unless you have large numbers, can you cope without a Plugin?

Mike,

That would be fine. I think I have about 250 of them so I'll just do a few at a time until I get them all done.

Thanks!
Bill