So i have read a few posts about SQLlite. but mainly for rootsmagic 7.
has anyone a simple solution to automatically read through the Rootsmagic 8 database and where there is a Baptism date and location but no Christening date or location then copy the data?
it is a pain when using Ancestry that uses Baptims dates and FamilySearch that uses Christening dates
I would estimate that 97% of SQLite scripts for RM7 will also work on RM8, give or take. The main differences are scripts for citations due to RM8’s reusable citations and anything having to do with To Do lists and Tasks because RM7 has To Do lists and RM8 has Tasks.
I suspect that you are wanting either to convert all the Christen facts in your database to Baptism facts or vice versa. If so, then you will need to convert all rows in the EventTable from EventType 3 to EventType 7 (Christen to Baptism) or vice versa. The same script would work both on RM7 and RM8. If there is a Baptism fact and you want to add the Christen fact while keeping the Baptism fact, the processing is possible but is more complicated.
There are cautions. These kinds of changes are not supported or condoned by RM and you are on your own to repair any damage you might do to your database. Do plenty of backups and practice on a test database. And you need to be careful about Baptism facts because they can sometimes be ambiguous, meaning either an infant baptism or an adult baptism.
I do use SQLite quite a bit, especially for queries that do not change my database. And when absolutely necessary, I do run scripts that change my database. But before running a script that changes my database, I do everything in my power to find a way to accomplish the same thing from inside of RM without running a script that updates the database. In your case, if I had a 100 facts to change, I would do them by hand from the RM user interface. If I had 2000 facts to change, I would give in and do the job with a script.
I would echo what @thejerrybryan said and add:
If you duplicate Baptisms as Christenings or vice-versa, then you have to decide whether to allow both in reports or other outputs, whether citations, notes media, webtags… should be duplicated and then face the question of syncing them with each other.
Check what the effect is in TreeShare Compare when you manually change a Birth Event to Christening. Likewise in FamilySearch Central when you change a Christening to a Baptism on the RM side. These results may affect your choice between duplicating and converting.
For more technical discussion about using SQL to make the changes, I recommend doing so in the Forum at sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com
And there may be differences in how various religions look at baptisms and christenings. The christening is when a name is given to someone and the baptism is the commitment to follow Jesus. Usually both occur at the same ceremony. But for sects that practice adult baptism, they would not be the same.
Baptism is one of the 7 rites of the Catholic church, christening is not.
Here is a script with which all events of a given Fact Type can be changed to another:
https://sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com/facts-change-fact-type/
That’s easier than duplicating the data from events of a given Fact Type to new events of another… Maybe the switch is good enough for your purposes: convert Chrs to Baps for work with Ancestry, switch Baps to Chrs for work with FSFT. Either way, you are going to have issues…
It’s a rabbit hole. One of my kids was baptized in a Catholic Church, the other Episcopal. The wonderful episcopal church they attended for Sunday school was explicit, “we see ourselves as part of the Catholic (not Roman) . We share the smoke and robes of the RC. On paper we don’t believe in transubstantiation but in reality all our clergy do. We welcome RC, thoug they typically don’t welcome us …”
Genealogy, being a historical pursuit, brings up so much contradiction in religious practice . I choose to ignore it.