A newcomer to rootsmagic 9, I read in instructions when designing source templates you can drag and drop the fieldname into the footnote template. Is this stall available as i cannot get it to work.
Thanks in advance
All the source templates that I use are templates of my own design rather than being RM’s built-in templates. So I’m pretty familiar with designing source templates in RM. I can’t picture anywhere in the template design process where you drag and drop the field name into the footnote field. I pretty much need to type in my sentence including template fields enclosed in [square brackets].
I may be missing something obvious. Could you post a link or a screen shot of where the instructions say you can drag and drop the fieldname into the the footnote field?
Extract from RM9 help.
Building the template
There are three template fields, Footnote Template, Short Footnote Template and Bibliography Template. They are all created in the same way. The only differences are the fields used, the order of the fields, the field options used for the lead (first) field, where a shortened (abbreviated) form is used, and the punctuation.
To build a source template, you would drag the fields from the field list on the left to a template on the right. You can also type in the field name, but you have to remember to add the square brackets and spell the name as shown at the left. You would also add the punctuation, text, field options, and switches to complete the template. For a full discussion of the template language, see the topic Sentence Template Language.
RM9 Help must have been written with imagination on this topic or on an in-house, unpublished version of the application. Maybe field name drag’n’drop will be in a future release. You can copy and paste a row but that’s hardly helpful:
[Type] Type Text X e.g. folder X
Besides, one typically wants to add switches and modifiers and bridging text and punctuation around each variable so I wonder if drag’n’drop really offers any advantage. Better might be some way of highlighting which fields have been added to the sentence template one is editing. Likewise for catching field misspellings and syntax errors in the sentence template.
The page you are referring to may be found at Creating a source template The reference to dragging and dropping the template variables is surely an error. I didn’t think drag and drop would work. I tried it just now, and it didn’t work for me.
As Tom mentioned already, it’s hard to see much if any benefit from a drag and drop process as a part of the workflow to create a source template. There is much, much more that needs to be done to put a source template sentence together than just including the template variables in the sentence.
Many thanks for your thoughts and ideas on this subject.
The drag reference almost has to refer to the action of moving. It appears the actual operation is the Add Field button (although they don’t show the specific insertion point being acted upon):
Confirming dragging fields on the sentence template is not working, and has been reported to development.
RM Inc can knock a bug off of the list just by fixing the documentation. Don’t try to add drag n’ drop here.
It would be much more useful to make the database fields (name, date etc. in the edit person window) drop targets for text dragged from other apps (e.g. the browser)
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