Re: [Gramps-devel] Generation information from a filter?

[Alex R. <sh...@al...>]

Adam,

On Sat, Jan 01, 2005 at 11:35:46PM -0500, Adam Stein wrote:
> I'm using the GenericFilter class to run filters on the database (from a=
=20
> programming level).  I get back a list of people that match the filter=20
> (obviously).  Is there anyway to determine what generation an individual=
=20
> is in (assuming the first person in the list is generation 0)?  It seems=
=20
> that all the report plugins do the filtering themselves so that they can=
=20
> get this information rather than use the GenericFilter class.

The problem with generation numbers is that they only make sense within
a single family line. More specifically, if two people have a common
ancestor then one can assign some meaningful generation numbers.

The GenericFilter is not limited to people with common ancestors. For
example, I can create a filter matching women. For that list (i.e. the
list of all women) assigning generation numbers is problematic -- some
of them may be unrelated and then we're stuck without an objective
criterion: birth date? death date? high school graduation date?

That said, nothing prevents us from writing generic find_all_ancestors()
and find_all_descendants() functions so that all reports can use them
(place them somewhere in e.g. Utils). These would be recursive
functions going from a person to its ancestors/descendants untill the
end of the data.

Not sure if this completely answers your questions :-)
Alex

--=20
Alexander Roitman   http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html
Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building
2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN  55455
Tel (612) 625-7566   FAX (612) 626-9201