Hiding citations
I'm wondering how other people handle this common situation.
A new person is entered and information from birth and death certificate indexes from Ancestry are cited.
Later, images of birth and death certificates also from Ancestry are cited.
I'd like to hide the citations to the index information in reports as they are completely superseded by the certificate citations and yet I don't want to completely eliminate the citation.
I know that there is no way in RM to hide a citation, but I was considering doing something in the database where I might change the ownerID in the CitationLinkTable from the PersonID to (PersonID + 10^12).
I checked and it doesn't cause an error, it keeps the OwnerID datatype as INT and it is easily reversible.
There is also a "isPrivate" flag and a Flags column, but I couldn't adjust them so as to prevent RM from showing the citation.
I already have a utility that will adjust the sorting order of a citation list. I'm thinking that I might add a feature to hide citations using the "+ 10^12" method above.
I could still display the hidden citations in the utility with a second where clause.
I would also write a simple SQL to restore all hidden citations (while maybe preserving them in a separate Aux table.)
I also confirmed that the database tool- remove phantom records, doesn't remove the hidden rows, at least in the current release.
Any thoughts?
Richard Otter
I confess I delete the citations that I consider superseded, but it feels sort of bad to do so. So I wish there was a better way to manage the publication of citations so that I could keep superseded citations but not publish them.
I presently have a different need concerning citations. Suppose I wish to publish some data online using GedSite, although I suppose it could be using any software. And suppose I wish to put as much data online as possible for people who are deceased without putting any data at all online for people who are still living. GedSite works via GEDCOM, so I can include the spouse who is deceased in the GEDCOM and omit the spouse who is still living from the GEDCOM.
Among other things, this approach has the benefit from my perspective of not including the Marriage fact or any other couple facts for the couple. But something like a courthouse marriage certificate might be the best or only source I have for the deceased person's birth date and place, so there is a citation for the marriage record connected the the Birth and Death facts for the deceased person. And my citations include a transcription and image of the courthouse marriage record, which has birth information for the spouse who is still living. So I need to make both the citation and the image of the courthouse marriage record private somehow or other.
If there was a privacy flag in RM for citations and media that would prevent their export in GEDCOM, that would solve my problem. And I could do an SQLite script to set the flag globally for just the citations and media where it was needed. But sadly, that feature is is not in RM. I'm still trying to figure that one out.
I read your response as saying that you would find a method to hide citations useful, but not necessarily for the reason I suggested in my post.
Well, that suggests another feature- allow the creation of more than one set of hiding instructions.
One set could hide superseded citations semi-permanently, another might be more temporary and would go in effect just before you create your GEDCOM export and then removed immediately after.
An auxiliary table stored in the database could hold several sets of hiding instructions. An externally run SQL script would switch between the hiding sets or restore all citations to visible.
Richard
What I was thinking about doing on my own was to write a script to delete the citations that needed to be hidden temporarily. Then I would make a temporary copy of my database, run the script against the temporary database, export the GEDCOM from the temporary database, and delete the temporary database. My production database would never be modified and never would be at risk. I would have to think about the advantages and disadvantages of doing it by actually hiding the "hidden" citations in the production database. There certainly are some advantages.