Intro

RootsMagic 4 users have been seeking an improvement to Named Groups, namely "dynamic refresh" or, at least, a manual refresh button. The idea is that a group’s membership should be updated on demand following the rules that set it up in the first place. Currently, a group is static, requiring the user to edit the group, setting up the rules all over again.This query provides a manual refresh for a specific group, i.e., the ancestors of a specified person. While not the most challenging criterion for group membership and thus not a big time-saver, nonetheless it demonstrates the principle upon which more complex rules could be based. AncestorsGroup.sql is built around the query described at Ancestors Query which is used virtually intact.

Download

AncestorsGroup.sql
NB- LabelID instead of LabelValue error corrected 2011-11-27 21:45 EST

Usage

1. Backup your database before you do this every time until you are confident that it does no harm.
2. In RM4, create a named group having the words "ancestors" and "#RIN" in it, where RIN is the number of the person whose ancestors are to be in the group, e.g., "Tom’s ancestors #269". Do not leave this group empty, add anyone immediately or do the next step before creating any more new groups (bug in RM4).
3. Open your RM4 database with SQLite Expert Personal and load AncestorsGroup.sql into the SQL editor.
4. Execute the query (F5)
5. You will be prompted to enter a value for @StartRIN: enter the number of the person in the name of the group, in this example "269" (without quotes and the leading #).
6. When the query has finished, you will need to refresh the RM4 sidebar view of your group by selecting another group and then re-selecting it.

Discussion

The RM4 GroupTable allows for group members to be defined in ranges of consecutive numbers between a StartID and EndID, thus shortening the table versus one row per member. This script makes no attempt to use this capability so it consumes one row per member with EndID=StartID. I don’t know if there is any significant efficiency gained as a result of ranges.