* Ancestral Sources - Flag Support

[NickWalker]

As has been documented elsewhere, I decided to remove flag support from AS when I was preparing to release AS7. The reasons for this were because the Census Date Check/Flag Check were becoming too time-consuming to support with the census 'types' and all the other work I had to with rich text, source templates, etc. Also FHUG members had been regularly advised to use expressions rather than Flags for various reasons which I had taken on board and decided this would mean that once users had adapted to expressions they wouldn't want Flags anymore. Problem solved for AS: I removed the flag support.

Since then I've had numerous (polite) complaints about the lack of flag support and have seen various threads where others (mainly St. Mike) have tried to help people to use expressions but it's clear to me that there are various cases where it just isn't straightforward to use expressions. There are also users who like to have flags displayed in the customised FH properties window which can't be done with expressions.

I've always gone out of my way to provide the options that people want wherever possible so I've decided I'll add support back for the creation of flags into the next version of AS. I still think expressions are the preferable way to deal with this, but for those who prefer to use flags, or where expressions don't work, the option will be there.

Best wishes

Nick

[phende]

You are too good to us, Nick. I was one of those who found expressions more difficult to use in order to add census icons to diagrams. It isn't just the need to learn some abstruse syntax. There are some practical difficulties.
To use an expression, that expression needs to be able to look at something. The recommendation was to look at the Source title, which means that titles had to conform to a specific format. You solved that problem for me for future use with a customisation of the Method 1 title but I have had to run through my existing sources and modify them (with advice from Mike) to ensure that they conform. In the course of this I realised I had made some Census entries without creating a Source, always where a single person was present and a note reference to the census seemed to be sufficient. Adding a flag to that person had been a dawdle. Now I need to create a Source for that one person.
I deleted all my census flags I now have a series of expressions for each census in the UK, USA and Canada. In the Diagram Options dialogue window for box properties, it is impossible to see the whole expression. You have to select one and click on Edit to see if it is the right one. Calico Pie could do better on this.

No. Expressions are too difficult to handle. I think I'll stick my flags back in.

Peter

[NickWalker]

I'm currently testing a new release Ancestral Sources v7.2.1 which re-introduces flag support. Feel free to try it out. I'll wait and see if any big issues are reported before releasing it properly.

Changes since last official release v7.1.3:

New in v7.2:

• Flag support has now been added back into Ancestral Sources for those who prefer to use flags rather than expressions in Family Historian. Flags can be allocated to different census types and years as well as baptisms, births, marriages, burials and deaths.
• There is a new facility to apply flags to individuals who have existing census, baptisms, births, marriages, burials and deaths.
• Added a new auto-text function WORDNUMORD: it is similar to the WORDNUM function but returns the ordinal value, e.g. twenty-first rather than twenty-one.
• Have added in some support for Rejected Facts and Preferred facts. In some situations rejected facts will not be shown and preferred facts will be the default. This was inspired by comments from David Potter.
• Made an improvement to the suggested marriage status on census records so that it should ignore marriages that are after the census date in question. This was inspired by a forum post by John Hanson
• Removed {REF} from rich-text auto-text templates for Death for consistency.
• John Morrison pointed out that " characters had an unnecessary \ copied to the front of them in rich text source text generated by auto-text. This should now be fixed.
• Following reloads the rich text source was displayed, even if a plain text source was used. It also turned off auto-text in rich-text source text. This has now been fixed.

New in v7.1.5:

• Added new auto-text functions ADD, SUB, MULT, DIV to allow integer calculations on numerical values. These may be helpful in particular to use in conjunction with RTF-WIDTH values. Inspired by conversations with Chris Read.
• Added new auto-text function TITLEF which capitalises the just the first letter of the expression.
• Added new auto-text function WORDNUM which changes a positive integer (up to four digits) to an english form - there are 6 different formats to choose from. This was suggested by Chris Read.
• Fixed issues where { } \ and tab characters were not displayed correctly in rich text format. This problem was reported by Chris Read.
• Fixed various issues with tables including where numbers or widths of cells differed between different rows.
• Added an extra paragraph to the auto-text template help page to recommend that duplicates of templates are made, rather than editing the standard ones. This was a result of a conversation on the FHUG forum.
• Fixed an issue where changing font or font size could cause the cursor focus to change unexpectedly. This issue was reported by Chris Read.

Ancestral Sources v7.2.1 (64 bit version)

Ancestral Sources v7.2.1 (32 bit version)