Sorting Fact Types in Person View

RootsMagic
1

Is it possible to sort fact types in the person view? i.e. alphabetical, or have the ability to move them up or down in the fact type list

2

There are three options to sort facts in the Edit person screen, 1) Date, 2) Place or 3) Fact type. see the ellipses menu and choose “Options.”

3
  • Date order is the default.
  • Date order and Place order work as you might expect.
  • If you are using Place order, it’s helpful also to enable the Reverse Place Names option.
  • Fact type order is mystifying to me. I can’t figure out what “fact order” it is actually using. It seems to start out with Birth, Death, Burial, and Marriage in that order. But after that, my remaining facts almost seem to be in random order. The order for the remaining facts may not actually be random. But if not, then I can’t figure out what the order actually is.
  • The user cannot influence the order by moving them up or down in the fact type list. Well, you can order the facts when you are displaying them in date order by giving them false sort dates. But if you give them false sort dates just to be able to look at them in some particular order in the Edit Person screen, those same false sort dates will also be used in reports. Aside from that, Date order and Place order and Fact Type order are the only options.

I have always been oriented towards being able to see the timeline for a person. So the default of date order has always worked well for me. I even share Marriage and Divorce events with both spouses so that the events will show up in their individual timelines in printed reports (descendant narrative reports). Otherwise, Marriage and Divorce only show up in a different timeline which is for the couple as a pair. But it certainly has occurred to me that some other orderings might be useful in the Edit Person screen. Well, I think of it as groupings rather than as orderings.

For example, it might be useful to group together the Birth, Marriage, Death, and Burial facts, and the Fact Type sort order already seems to do that. It also might be useful to group together “residence” type facts such as Residence, Census, and City Directory. And there might be other such groupings that could be useful. But what we have available right now is not actually groupings. Rather, it is three different sort orders.

I use program called GedSite to publish my RM data to the Web. GedSite supports a concept called tag sets. What is called a fact or an event in RM is called a tag in GedSite. So for example, GedSite supports things like BMDB tag sets where Birth, Marriage, Death, and Burial facts are grouped together and Census tag sets where Census facts are grouped together. It may sound a little crazy, but the same fact can even be displayed in more than one tag set at the same time. I use my preferred timeline order rather than tag sets in GedSite, but I can see the utility of being able to group fact types in this manner. Perhaps RM could support a similar concept some day in its Edit Person screen.

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4

Thank you for your response. You cleared up a lot of things and have some solid ideas.