I’m not sure whether to categorize this post as a bug notice or a feature notice or a feature request or a question or a tip. In any case, I have discovered that RM9’s Merge All Duplicate Citations tools Is case insensitive.
For example, I have some very old citations that go back to the Family Origins days in the 1990’s where the footnote is FamilySearch and the Page is IGI Batch Number M519001. Except that sometimes the Page is IGI Batch number M519001.
Family Origins didn’t have source templates, so this information was entered into what we would now call the free form template. My old citations were not well done and I’m cleaning them up. But the issue is that the Merge All Duplicate Citations tool in RM9 merged citations even though they differed in the case of the word “number”. At this point, I have no idea whether it was me that entered “number” vs. “Number” sometimes, or if I copied and pasted the text out of Family Search and the variability was in FamilySearch itself.
This is an extremely trivial matter. It matters only because I have an SQLite script that compares an RM7 database with an RM9 database and my script is case sensitive. So my script is identifying mismatches between my RM7 database and my RM9 database that are trivially different. Before anyone suggests it, I know how to make my script case insensitive but I’m not sure I want to do so, Instead, I want to be able to be assured that my script to compare databases is very exacting.
My current strategy is to identify and standardize any case based differences between my RM7 and RM9 databases. There are fewer than 100 of them in all and it will not take much time to make all the fixes. I’m sharing this information for the benefit of anyone for whom the upper/lower case issue in citations is important.
Agree completely @RichardOtter — @thejerrybryan ( as do quite a few others) has a lot of great tips and suggestions posted on this forum-- a lot of them should be in the on-line help BUT for now, all you can do is either make your own word pad document of Jerry’s tips or bookmark this thread.
Yes, that’s the way it works, and that’s the whole point. After merging duplicate citations in RM9, the surviving case did not match the case that was in RM7 in some cases and my comparison between RM9 and RM7 identified the difference.
I tried to make clear that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it’s something that a user might wish to be aware of.
I was doing the comparison using SQLite. I’m aware that using SQlite in such a manner can be a touchy subject, even if SQLite is only doing a query and is not changing anything. But for example, suppose you imported from RM7 into RM9, ran RM9’s Merge All Duplicate Citations tool, and exported your RM9 database to GEDCOM. RM9’s export to GEDCOM has to unmerge the merged citations. If you then compare the GEDCOM from RM9 to GEDCOM from the original RM7 database, there will be a mismatch in the case of some of the citations. A text editor and GEDCOM is being used to look at the case of the citations, and no SQLite script was being used at all.
Does anybody care that the case of some of the text in some of the citations may have become changed? Maybe, and maybe not.
Another great find for everyone’s awareness! Thank you!
Jerry, would you support positioning this finding as a tip request to be added to help/wiki docs (for now) plus a feature request? And perhaps it would make sense to broaden the feature request to include a “Match Case” option in all Search, Replace, and Merge actions.
[Edited] (The default “Match Case” setting could also be requested.) Thoughts?