Since the first of the year, I have been doing all my primary data entry into RM8 and then using GEDCOM to move the new data back into my production RM7 database. For a lot of reasons, RM7 needs to continue to be my production database for the time being but I wanted to use RM8 for real work as much as possible.
However, I have had to abandon this workflow. The problem is that copying data with GEDCOM results in duplicate source templates when you have user defined source templates. Even though the duplicate source templates are identical, there is no automatic or manual way to merge them other than SQLite.
When I copy my newly changed RM8 data back into RM7, I just include the people I changed in the GEDCOM. After importing the GEDCOM into RM7, I have to a manual merge on the people I changed. All goes well with the manual merge except for the duplicated source templates. I think people merge should merge the source templates if they are identical. And beyond that, RM’s source template management should support both manual and automatic merge of source templates.
This problem has been well known for years, but I tend to keep forgetting that it exists. Because drag and drop uses GEDCOM for its data transport, a drag and drop is also very prone to creating duplicate source templates that can’t be merged. Even though I was encountering the problem in RM7 as I was importing RM8 data, I have verified that the problem still exists in RM8. For example, if you are dragging and dropping between RM8 databases and if you have user defined source templates, you are likely to encounter the problem.