Hello, it would be very nice when the relationship will be automatic updated and not that you every time must do this by hand.
This is a long standing wish which is probably decades old. There are similar wishes for automatically color coding newly added people and for adding newly added people to groups.
The wish for updating a relationship for a newly added person would possibly be the easiest of these various wishes to do and it would possibly run the fastest. First of all, RM would need to save the base person for Set Relationships, something it does not now do. Then after an Add operation, it would need to calculate and set the relationship just for that one newly added person. It wouldn’t need to run the fullblown Set Relationship process.
For the color coding and groups wishes, there is some debate about whether such a feature should be fully automatic or not. For relationships, it’s hard to see any downside for the relationship being fully automatic. Well, one downside might be if you deleted the base person for Set Relationships or if you gave the base person new parents or new spouses or something like that. Another downside might be if you added or deleted parents of spouses for an existing person rather than that you were adding a new person. But basically, this one seems like something that would be a really good idea.
By the way, I would even settle for a one click “Refresh Relationships” that would not ask any dumb questions like if you really wanted to or not and that would simply use the current base person no matter which person in your database was presently highlighted or selected.
No matter how this would be done, I think the base person for Set Relationships should be settable via Settings => General Settings and it should not simply be the Root person. It should be possible for it to be a different person than the Root person.
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Clarifying what you are saying – can’t the Root Person and Set Relationship person already be different people ? (though they can also be the same (but still need to be set separately either way).
Kevin
Well, in a certain sense they can’t presently be different people because there is a saved Root Person but there is not a saved Set Relationship person. Something that exists can’t be the same or different from something that doesn’t exist. My emphasis was that if and when a saved Set Relationship person begins to exist, the existing Root person shouldn’t also serve the function of being the Set Relationship person.
But I take your point. At the present time, you can Set Relationship to the same person who is the Root person and there is nothing preventing you from doing so. At the present time, my database is not set up that way, but there is nothing to prevent it. It’s just that the Set Relationship person is not saved and therefore there is no way to automate the refresh of Set Relationships.
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understood – For the record – of your hundreds of post - this was the first I was confused by.
yes agreed – and given that the save things it would be a relatively simple ask – and event to take a step further have multiple would be nice
It is, sort of. Not as a special data thingy in the ConfigTable but in the Relate1 and Relate2 columns of PersonTable. The Set Relationships tool assigns the code that translates to “self” to these columns for the selected reference person.
I expect a query to find the person with the “self” code would be fast enough, even as fast as one digging through the ConfigTable, the logical place to store the Reference Person ID for the database outside of the PersonTable.
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Interesting idea and you are correct.
I just now ran the requisite SQLite query against my RM9 database of about 40,000 people to find the “self” person for Set Relationships. The SQLite manager reports query times of about 1/2200 second (.about 0.45 milliseconds). That’s essentially zero as compared to the slightly more than 2.0 seconds required to do a full Set Relationships on my database.
Therefore it would be silly to store the “self” person for Set Relationships anywhere else. The “self” person for Set Relationships should be considered already to be stored.
The only thing special that Set Relationships would need to do would be to revert to the current behavior if the user has just done a Clear Relationships or has deleted the “self” person or anything like that.
Not able to test this question for a while but wonder what happens currently to the relationship status when the reference is deleted. If it does not clear the relationships, that’s an issue.
I just made a copy of my database and deleted the “self” person (the reference person). All other relationships remain.