The subject says it all. What does “Sorted by Fact Type” mean in RM8’s Edit Person?
I’ve watched Bruce’s video where he did a demo of the fact sorting options for RM8’s Edit Person screen. The best I can recall, all he said was that you could sort by Fact Type. But when I do that, I don’t understand the sort order. It’s certainly not the name of the facts as a character string. It looks like maybe the Birth, Death, and Burial facts are sorted first, which makes sense. And maybe Marriage comes next. But after that, I can make no sense of the order. I do make note that all the facts after that are user defined facts except for the Primary Name which comes last.
I wasn’t sure what you were talking about at first since I never use those options. It appears the facts are being sorted by the database FactTypeId in the FactTypeTable when you chose that drop down selection. I can’t possibly figure out why someone would want to do that.
Yep, I checked with SQLite and you hit the nail on the head.
The FactTypeId field is a numeric field which is the primary key for the FactTypeTable. It’s there for purely internal RM use, and it’s hard to imagine a less useful way to sort the facts for display in the RM user interface. Sorting by the Name field in the FactTypeTable might make sense. But other than that, it seems to me that the RM8 feature to sort by Facts is so meaningless and dysfunctional that it would improve the product if the feature were simply removed. Obviously, nobody has to use the feature, but it’s really a very negative feature as is.
The reason nobody uses that sort is that it makes no logical sense. I cover it in my classes so nobody will ask the question, why is it there and what is it used for?
