Highlighting a person in Family view and then clicking on the icon for Pedigree view results in showing a descendant of the highlighted person and their Pedigree. Why?
I tried the same thing. When I do it, the same person is displayed. Not sure why it’s happening to you.
Most likely it’s the fruits of a new feature in RM8 such that when you switch views, it tries to remember what the view to which you are switching looked like that last time you were in that view. It then tries to restore that view to its previous status. Apparently, there were users who requested the new feature.
I don’t totally understand how the new feature is supposed to work and therefore I’m probably not describing it 100% accurately. Every time I think I have figured it out, it does something totally confounding that I can’t understand. Sometimes it will switch to a person that I haven’t even viewed since I sat down at the computer.
Among other things that are bad about this new feature, it means that you can’t highlight a person in the current view and predict what’s going to happen if you change views. That’s because what’s going to happen doesn’t just depend on what’s in the current view which you can see. It also depends on what used to be in the view to which you are planning to switch and which you cannot now see.
The feature really needs to be removed. And if it can’t be removed, there needs to be a way to turn it off.
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The behavior is very unpredictable Sometimes (actually a majority of the time), it does something logical and reasonable. Sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on what the view to which you are switching looked like the last time you were in that view. It’s even hard to create a scenario that’s repeatable enough to record it and show how confounding it can be.
It’s quite logical but not intuitive. If you’re in the family view with someone highlighted and then select the pedigree view it will display in this way. If the person is in your direct line, it will display the person as a parent with the child that you’re related to as the main or root person. If the person in the family view that you selected is not in your direct line, then it will display the oldest child as the root person in the pedigree view.
I hope that helps.
I think it’s more complicated than that because there are five views involved in this process, not just the Pedigree View. Plus, I don’t think it’s predictive in the sense of who is in your direct line. Rather, it seems to depend on how the view you are switching to looked the most recent time you were there.
I have tried and tried and tried to run through all the permutations and combinations of switching views to understand how it works. I don’t think it’s either logical or predictable. I can be in View A and highlight a particular person and switch to View B and get a different result than the previous time I was in View A and highlighted the same person and switched to View B.
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I agree Jerry and I too have been going round in circles trying to understand it.
There was a new explanation offered recently that still make no sense to me. Namely, the explanation was that it has something to do with selecting which spouse is displayed in Pedigree View and Family View when a person has more than one spouse. As I said, that makes no sense to me because I can’t see anything in the observed behavior that is based on the number of spouses a person has.
No matter the cause, I really dislike the new behavior as compared to the behavior of RM7. The RM7 behavior was both very useful and very easy to understand. The RM8/RM9 behavior seems neither. But even if the behavior is not restored to be as useful, I would still love to understand how it’s supposed to work. That way I wouldn’t be so flummoxed when I change views and something totally unexpected and inexplicable happens.
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Pedigree definition
noun
- A line of ancestors; a lineage.
- A list of ancestors; a family tree.
It doesn’t include any Descendants.
Perhaps the definition needs to be changed ???
.
I think the issue is a little more subtle than that.
In RM7, when you went to Pedigree View the person who was highlighted in the previous would be placed in the leftmost position of Pedigree View and would still be highlighted. As you say, there were no descendants.
In RM8/RM8, when you go to Pedigree View the person who was highlighted in the previous view is placed somewhere in the Pedigree View but it is not necessarily the left most position. So the complaint is first of all that the position is not the left most position and second of all that the position seems random. I’m sure the position is not really random, but I wish I could understand the rules.
That being said, I have long wished for a slightly different option, and I would emphasize it would only be an option and it would not default. Pedigree View already has an easy to use option to choose 5 or 6 generations. Descendant View already has an easy to use option to choose the number of generation. So I’m talking about an easy to use option (an OPTION!) that if enabled would place the highlighted person in the parents’ position of the left most person rather actually in the left most position.
Why should I want such a crazy sounding option? Well, something I do from time to time is to place the main view into Pedigree View and to filter the Index in the left side panel by a group. Having done so, I find it very useful to scroll up and down the Index in the left side panel and to look at the people in the group in the main main Pedigree View. But when I’m doing this, I can’t see the person’s spouse unless I shift the main Pedigree View over by one person every time I highlight a different person in the Index in the left side panel.
The feature I would like to see might or might make any sense to any of you all, but it would be an OPTION only and it would make sense to me. But it would require returning the basic behavior back to the RM7 behavior where the highlighted person is placed in the left most position and would only be moved over by one when and if the new option were enabled. This seemingly random behavior in RM8/RM9 just needs to go away. Or if it is to stay, it really needs to be explained.
Doing what I’m doing with scrolling through the sidebar index with the main view raises the interesting question of which spouse to show for the highlighted person if the person has more than one spouse. But RM has a perfect answer already. Namely, it’s the spouse who most recently was displayed for the person.
You can see the same effect of scrolling through the sidebar Index with the screen in Family View and RM has to make the same decision about which spouse to display when the highlighted person has multiple spouses. And again, RM already has a perfectly good answer to that question.
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My point is that RM isn’t following the definition of Pedigree.
Sometimes when I select a Person to see their Pedigree, it throws in the 1st born, or another random child, which now makes the Pedigree View for THAT person, not the one I want.
What the heck I can always use 7 and get the correct results 