Source Citation Sort RM8 #sources #citations

Issue

As for earlier versions, the order in which Citations for a given fact are presented in RM8 is the order in which they were added. Some users wish for them to be sorted alphabetically by name.

Solution

A brute force method was described for earlier versions at Source Citation Sort . In that case, the name of the Master Source was presented in Citation Manager so the CitationTable itself had to be reordered according to the Source Name and required links from tables for media and web tags to track the changes. With the introduction of TreeShare, there was a further complication for links between Citations and Ancestry.com. Revisions to the database structure in RM8 cause that script to fail.

Luckily, those changes in database design for RM8 that enabled reusable citations (master citation concept) make the job of sorting the citations easier and faster than for pre- RM8. It is the new CitationLinkTable that must be re-ordered and that has no knock-on effect for media, web tags or Ancestry.com links which remain linked to the CitationTable which does not need to be re-ordered. The new CitationName field requires that it be the second sorting field after the Source Name.

To sort citations in a RM8 database, load the following script into a SQLite manager with a fake #RMNOCASE extension and execute it against the target .rmtree file (backup first!). Note that the database file likely must not be open in RootsMagic as it may cause a ‘file is locked’ error on the outboard SQLite. When you reopen the database in RM8, run Files > Tools > Rebuild Indexes to clear out indexing errors from the outboard process reported by RM8 Test Integrity.

This post is the outcome of the Forum discussion CitationSort.sql giving an error when run..,

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