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#676 CREATED_BY tag for records
I wish there would be a created_by tag for each INDI,
FAM, SOUR, NOTE and on sub 01 records like BIRT, DEAT,
CHR, MARR and so on.
one of the highlights of PGV is the idea of
collaboration. This is a revolution for projects, which
are typically done by single users. There is still one
person responsible for (t)his project, but he is no
longer alone and now has to deal with several new
multi-user problems.
And as more people are working on one GEDCOM, the more
overlapping of their work you will get. So it will
happen quite often, that several user of one family
update the same INDI record, add additional relas,
notes and so on.
At the moment PGV only keeps track of the last_update,
but changes this information on every new update. Any
history is cuttedand any information about the one who
added this has gone (which is poor especially for a
genealogical tool ;-).
I myself have had this problem several times and asked
my users to put these information manually. But this
typically works only for one, two times.
I think this could be done better automatically by PGV
without any problems.
Even if there is still one responsible admin for each
of my GEDCOMS who has to accept the updates of the
ordinary users, this should be done by machine!
I consider, that this could increase slightly the size
of a GEDCOM in a very short time - if there are active
users and most relevant tags are being tracked.
To keep such problems small, one idea is to handle this
by a config-switch:
keep track of creation always/never/only 0-records
and a table for possible / meaningful 1-records
so not every record gets stupidly marked, only those
records which are relevant to the researcher.
Another idea could be to keep the whole history in DB.
But in my opinion these information belong to the
GEDCOM as it now holds information provided by many
people and not only by one as in the classical
single-user environment!
what do you think of this?
Christian
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GEDCOM 5 allows for a SUBM (submitter) to be specified for
each 0-level record. This mechanism will take care of your
CREATED_BY idea.
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Greg : what do you think about using SUBM record ?
Is it allowed to add a DATE TIME subrecord ?
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I think there is a very neat way of doing this. Accordng to
the gedcom 5.5.1 spec, the CHAN tag allows a NOTE subtag. I
suggest using the NOTE field as a log of updates. After
each change, add a line to the NOTE field something like this:
<DATE> <USER> <UPDATE|DELETE> <FACT>
Thus the NOTE field will build up something like this:
10-JAN-2006 18:45 fisharebest <UPDATE> 1 BIRT\n2 DATE 01 JAN
2004
10-JAN-2006 18:46 nolensvolens <UPDATE> 1 BIRT\n2 DATE 01
JAN 2004\n2 PLAC London
10-JAN-2006 18:47 opus27 <DELETE> 1 SSN
This will give a full audit trail for every fact. It uses
only 5.5.1 syntax. It should be very simple to code. The
audit trail follows its data. If you want to undo someone's
change, you can look back through the log to find the
previous entry. What do you think?
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Was any of this ever implemented?
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I was waiting for some feedback on whether this was a good approach.
Nobody got back to me, and since it is not an issue that is particularly bothering me, it's not at the top of my list.
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IMHO, this is a lot of effort for little reward, and I don't have time to implement it. I'm therefore unassigning it, in case anyone else wants to pick it up.
My long-term goals are to store data in the database at an fact-level, rather than at object-level. It might be more appropriate to defer this change until then.