Using Age Variable in Sentence Structure

[davenmesa 0]

I wonder why the variable [A] can only be used when you have a date such as "Month - Day - Year"? The TMG7 variable [A] contains ONLY the Year !!!

 

Suggest that the age variable [A] be calculated, by TMG7, when "Month - Day - Year", or "Month - Year", or "Year" is available. TMG7 presently uses a routine that

should do the job; since it uses an age [A] variable on the detailed persons page.

 

Comment: I seldom know the full "Month-Day-Year" but always know the "Year". How do I submit this as a suggestion to TMG7 programmers?

 

David

[Jim Byram 0]

Have you tried the [AE] variable?

 

From help...

"The A variable produces output only when both the primary birth tag and the tag that contains the A variable contain the full (day, month, year) dates, and the age is over one year. The AE variable will produce an age if only approximate dates are known, but it will not be an exact age."

[Michael Hannah 0]

From my testing my notes about the age variables are as follows.

 

The [A] variable produces output in years only when both the primary tag in the Birth group and the tag that contains the [A] variable contain the full (day, month, year) dates, and the age is over one year. (If either date has an appended question mark, then the age will have an appended question mark.) [A] returns no value when the age can not be precisely calculated (e.g. incomplete dates that have only the year). If the [A] is bound by conditional brackets “” then the sentence variable is ignored for incomplete dates or an age less than one year and no age is output. An unconditional use of the variable will return “at an unknown age” for incomplete dates.

 

The [AE] variable will produce an exact age (years, months, and days) if both dates are complete. It will still produce output even if one or both of the dates is approximate, but it will only output years. The TMG documentation calls [AE] an “exact” age variable, I choose to call it an “exact or estimated” age variable.

 

There is currently no variable to always output just years regardless of the completeness of the dates.

 

Hope this helps to understand these age variables,

[davenmesa 0]

[AE] was the variable I was looking for.

Many thanks for the guidance.

 

David

[robinkaspar 0]

Regarding the use of <[AE]>, I discovered that it returns an age when the death date is a "before" date. So it reports the principle died at "age 64 years" when the age actually is not known, just that the person was deceased when an event occurred, like a spouse who predeceases the other one.

 

So obviously the answer is "don't use it in these cases." I would like to use it in my default death tag sentence (in conditional brackets), but I really don't know how many death tags I have in my database with "before" dates that would have to be manually changed to <[A]>.

 

Opinions?

 

Robin in Short Pump

[Michael Hannah 0]

Robin,

What I do for these situations is have a separate extra Role defined in my Death tag in addition to my default Role. For those people where I have not found sufficient data to assign reasonably accurate Birth and Death dates, and therefore any Age variable might be misleading, I use a Role whose sentence does not contain any Age variable.

I do not know of a filter to only find Dates which have a "Before" modifier, but you could use a List of Events report with a filter something like:

Tag Type Group is // Death // AND
Date // Has Modifier //       END

Scanning the Dates in the output you should be able to find appropriate event tags where you would wish to reassign the Role used.

Since the Age is based on both Birth and Death, and having a Date modifier in either might be a problem, you could use a dual filter of:

( Tag Type Group is // Birth //   OR
  Tag Type Group is // Death // ) AND
  Date // Has Modifier //         END

Carefully note the parentheses. In this report sorting first on Prin1 ID and second on Tag Type Group would group the Birth and Death tags together and give you an idea if you wanted to change the Role in the Death tag.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,