I really wish to take exception to your "half implemented" comment.
In the long run, the purpose of Gedcom is to communicate information to another product. Not all products have all of the same features.
Shared events - as far as I know - only exist in Legacy, Roots Magic, and a variation in The Master Genealogist. Currently, the Gedcoms for RM and Legacy can interchange Shared events perfectly.
Supposedly, TMG (not TNG!) does not import or export any Gedcoms that contain anything but Gedcom 5.5.1 standard tags so shared events (They call them Witnesses) do not escape from their bubble. (I have not played with TMG in a while, and, recently, I have had TMG users dispute this assertion but without evidence.)
What neither RM or Legacy do is to create a Gedcom where Shared events are converted to regular events for Gedcom export. I do not believe that anyone has yet determined how this might look, yet.
--> Note: It is likely that some further enhancements need to be made to Shared events so this conversion exercise might be done as part of any enhancements. One of the proposed enhancements is to add role notes onto the person sharing the event and including in the event sentences the ability to structure the Role Notes with the Main notes. In a Gedcom export to regular notes, would you have to add to the notes that the event was shared from someone else and this person participated as a <role>.
There are currently several Gedcom options that are clearly designed to facilitate export to a 3rd party product. (eg, the 2 note conversions, the Q dates conversion.) When you do those conversion, you do not plan on re-importing those Gedcoms back into Legacy.
I can tell you with confidence that these are not all easy changes. Each change is fraught with challenges with folks with existing family files that might be damaged.
Almost every Gedcom export change has to be married to a Gedcom import change.
When you start to add in Privacy concerns and partial gedcom export options, you have very difficult functionality to test. I personally did a lot of testing in this area and was only able to cover a fraction of all of the test cases that exist.
I almost forgot to chat about SourceWriter Sources... again. These are a Legacy unique features. Each template comes with its own baggage with respect to Gedcom export. I believe that, when a new Template is created, the Gedcom export and import may sometimes be needed to be updated to support it. (I do not claim to be the SW expert among the testers so I do not look at this.)
Being able to export a SW Source and then re-importing it into Legacy is really only an archival issue. The key is can Legacy Gedcom export convert a SW source into a standard "Basic" source without loss of content that can be in turn understood by most 3rd party products.
john.
At 03:20 PM 12/5/2013, Ward Walker wrote:
Jay,
I think it will be a long time before we have a new interchange standard that deals with these two features. To my thinking, whenever a software vendor implements a proprietary new feature for data entry (and internal data structure), they should implement a workaround for the export of the resulting data. From day one. Why would I want to send to my distant cousins a GEDCOM for which I have to apologize due to its garbled sources or missing events?
The Legacy import process already has a few workarounds to accommodate non-standard quirks in GEDCOMs generated by other products. Why not workarounds for the two export issues? They both sound achievable at a reasonable cost.
Iâve already gone down the SourceWriter road, but I can easily avoid shared events until this happens. They are a nifty feature that is only half implemented.
Ward
From: Jay 1FamilyTree
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2013 2:23 PM
To: LegacyUserGroup@LegacyUsers.com
Subject: Re: Exporting Shared Events [WAS: Re: [LegacyUG] Shared vital Events]
Ward
When the standards for Gedcom were created way back when, this 'new feature' wasn't even considered or even imagined.
Don't blame the software for it, blame the standards that haven't been updated.
Whatever browser you are using to read this email and view the web certainly isnt following the standards of the HTML 3.0 which was the first widely used and accepted standards for that category of electronic data.
As Kristy said, the issue is wit the gedcom.
Jay
On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 7:44 AM, Ward Walker <wnkwal...@rogers.com> wrote:
- I agree, Gavin. To me, this is equivalent to the problem with SourceWriter source citations. I have long advocated that Legacy reformat these into readable detail citations during the process of converting them into Basic sources for the GEDCOM export. It seems that Millennia does not believe that a usable GEDCOM export is important.
- Every proprietary new feature should have an option to be mashed into the primitive GEDCOM standard without loss of data.
- Ward
- From: Gavin Nicholson
- Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 8:56 PM
- To: LegacyUserGroup@LegacyUsers.com
- Subject: RE: [LegacyUG] Shared vital Events
- Thanks Kirsty,
- Well I will be putting a change proposal in because it would be simple to export a copy of the events to each person. Yes it won't be shared anymore but that is far preferable to not existing at all. Essentially, with this as it is you can't use shared events and then give your data to anyone who doesnt use Legacy :-(
- Thanks for making us aware of this one.
- Gavin...
- From: Kirsty M. Haining [ mailto:khain...@comcast.net]
- Sent: Thursday, 5 December 2013 11:48 AM
- To: LegacyUserGroup@LegacyUsers.com
- Subject: RE: [LegacyUG] Shared vital Events
- Gavin, that is exactly what Iâm saying. Using a gedcom export, the data shows up ONLY under the event initiatorâs dataset.
- Keep in mind, however, that if you use Legacy to create your reports, charts, sharing via PDF files, etc. then the shared events should appear properly within the particular reports (according the report options youâve chosen). The issue is with gedcom export.*
- cheers,
- Kirsty
- J
- *Or, technically, the issue arises anytime youâre using another software program to handle a Legacy file, be it gedcom or native FDB format.
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