Change Generic City Directory fact to City Directory fact for each year
Years ago, I converted all my Census fact to year specific facts such as 1930 Census. I also have a City Directory fact and I have been changing all of them to year specific facts such as 1933 City Directory. I had been doing it by hand. It was tedious, so I wrote a script to complete the process all in one go.
The rationale for this approach both for Census and City Directory is to compensate for RM's weaknesses in dealing with multiple facts of the same type for the same person. Searching, making groups, and the use of People List View are all problems when there are more than one facts of the same type.
Tom wrote a script for Census years ago. I probably should have just taken his and adapted it to City Directory, but it was easy enough that I just wrote my own.
Uploaded files:I'd like to point out that when converting a fact/event from one fact type to another, one must consider its shares. Each role is assigned to a specific fact type.
I understand that this issue doesn't apply to you since you don't share facts, but if someone models their code on yours, a reminder may be appreciated.
Totally agree.
To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure I know how changing from one fact type to another would work from inside the RM user interface when there are roles involved. Would RM refuse to change the fact type if the new fact didn't have the same roles? Would the WitnessTable be updated properly? I don't know.
A script could handle this situation gracefully, but it would require a much more comprehensive script than my very simple one.
I did develop a script to change fact type for shared events years ago and updated it for RM8. See Facts - Change Fact Type