[Phpgedview-talk] This year's laundry list

[=James B. <ja...@bi...>]

I finally upgraded (v4.1.3), and can now present this year's wish 
list and questions. I'm gratified to see a lot of my past wish list 
items incorporated and the product is much improved. Thanks to all 
who have the skills, time and energy!

I realize that the mailing list is not best place to formally present 
requests for changes, but I'd like to get some feedback before going 
through that process. I don't live and breathe on Sourceforge, I'm 
striclty an end user with a premium on spare time.

HOW DO I...?

Is there any way to mass delete all descendants (or ancestors) of an 
individual, including associated families?
Can it be done through SQL?
I've tried deleting all INDIs with a certain surname in SQL, but they 
still show up in the program. How can I synch?
Is there a way to delete all familes that have been orphaned by 
deleting their INDIs? I do this sometimes manually, when I merge records, e.g.

How can I turn off Research Assistant? How did I turn it on? It must 
have been part of the install process....

WISHLIST:

- make "Save and go to record" the default closing action when "Add 
an unlinked person" is the calling link
- toggle Research Assistant on/off
- toggle Map on/off for better performance?
- put gedcom in every internal link. I've complained about this 
before. I run several gedcoms and work on them simultaneously. Some 
links explicitly embed the gedcom reference, most don't. Also, I've 
never been able to configure to avoid the program timing out. Almost 
every time I log back in, it changes the gedcom on me and it takes 
quite a while to get back to the record I was working in. 
Additionally, if I copy a link to send in an email, I have to hunt 
around for one to copy that contains the gedcom (e.g. "&ged=fooBar.ged").
- if using media viewer, set it to pop up in separate window? (not 
sure I like it better, may just turn if off in every gedcom. I like 
the simplicity and interface of the old viewer)
- put a "Add an unlinked person" link of every page (header?). I add 
a lot of new individuals and it's annoying to have to go through 
Admin tools every time.
- have the popup add/edit dialogs expand vertically to fit window 
(too much scrolling) or at least allow the default vertical size to 
be configured manually. I have to expand these windows every time I use them.
- "Add a new Media item": default "Highlighted" to "NO"
- allow not writing CHAN records to gedcom (if possible). If they 
have to remain for the program to work, add a config to remove 
the  "Do not update the CHAN (Last Change) record " checkboxes from 
the dialogs. I never use the CHAN info, and never care whether it's 
updated or not. It adds visual "junk" to the dialogs. And the CHAN 
records are (for me) unnecessary "junk" in the edit Raw process, as well.

At the risk of adding bloat, it would be nice if typing locations 
could be a little more intelligent. For example, typing a town name 
produced a drop-down list of all known towns with that name from the 
geographic place locations data, with the county included. I spend a 
lot of time looking up county names in a separate browser window. 
Also, browser helps me with drop-down lists of previously entered 
data, but only for the exact same field in the exact same dialog. If 
I enter a location, e.g., in a birth record in the quick update 
dialog, it's not available to me in the location field of the "Add a 
wife" FAM dialog.

Geographic place locations: This is a really useful feature for me, 
in that I can readily see how far places were from each other, after 
I enter records. I used to keep GoogleEarth open for this purpose. 
For example, when evaluating whether data found applies to an 
individual, it often helps to know distance, like whether it was a 
neighboring county or just across a state line. It took me quite a 
while to set up however, because I use a "non-standard" hierarchy". 
My top-level is the US state, not the country. For non-us locations, 
primarily German, I treat the kingdom as the top level. I don't want 
"United States" to clog up all the location data. So I had to take 
the provided location data and massage it in Excel before using it. I 
stripped out some data in the process. It wasn't easy as my Excel had 
a number of records limitation, so I had to work it in pieces and 
splice back together. If anyone wants the modified data, let me know.

Would sure be cool if the GoogleMaps API would allow dynamic 
repositioning of the markers and that would modify the coordinates in 
geographic place locations. Maybe in two years?

BUG:
Adding a Note to to a custom event, produces the following error:
ERROR 8: Undefined index: 03
0 Error occurred on in function print_main_notes
1 called from line 1123 of file functions_print_facts.php in function 
print_main_notes
2 called from line 1114 of file individual_ctrl.php in function print_notes_tab
3 called from line 978 of file individual_ctrl.php in function gettab
4 called from line 256 of file individual_ctrl.php in function init
5 called from line 2007 of file individual_ctrl.php in function require_once
6 called from line 29 of file individual.php

in the Notes section of the Individual page, where it displays the event name.

Here's the gedcom segment that produces the error:
1 EVEN Brother Albert dies
2 DATE 03 NOV 1978
2 PLAC Lexington, Lafayette Co., Missouri
2 NOTE Horace is executor (sp?)

James Birkholz
administrator (Betreuer der), Posen-EN mailing list & website
http://Posen-L.com & http://Birchy.com/GenWiki