Exploit your RootsMagic family tree database with SQLite Tools
Problems Some RootsMagic users bemoan the fact that events having the same date are displayed and reported in an unnatural or illogical order, having more to do with the order they were entered. Burial before Death or Christen before Birth are often mentioned. RootsMagic does provide the user with the option to modify the SortDate…
After running the query Children-SetOrderByBirthSortDate.sql, there may remain families that need to be manually arranged because one or more of the children has no birth-type fact or has a dominant birth-type fact with no date. This query produces a list of the parents who have such children. Look up and select one of the parents…
There have been recurring wishes expressed in the RootsMagic Forums for an enhancement to globally sort each family of children in the order they were born. For example, have a look at this thread, Sorting all children in the database by birth order. Expressed there are good reasons to be cautious about such an operation…
Storage formats Within the RootsMagic 4 database, several date-related fields exist. These fields can be grouped into into four different storage types: FLOAT, with the integer part representing number of days since 1899 Dec 31 and fractional part representing time of day EventTable – EditDate LinkTable – extDate (presumably) NameTable – EditDate (presumably) PersonTable –…
Introduction There has been a longstanding wish that RootsMagic would sort events that have no date or the same date (which might be as coarse as just the year) in an order that was natural or logical, e.g., Birth before Death being the simplest and most obvious example. The problem is that RootsMagic will sort…
Initial SortDate Algorithm The SortDate column in the EventTable contains very large numbers that have defied until now any easy method of decoding. After many experiments with date entry and inspection of the stored values, I now have deduced an algorithm that works fine for encoding single, pure dates and decoding corresponding SortDates. Date modifiers…