Living Flag Help

[kahuja 0]

Ok i need the for dummy's help here,

 

i had a blank for the living flag on many people, i tried to use TMG utility but found that only works if you have a ?, i had a blank

so i tried various things to get a flag for people and some how i have managed to make my own living flag set to N ,

 

i am fairly sure i am still living,

 

so i need the best way to clear all and start over from scratch, to get all my living flags in order,

 

Thanks

Kristina

[Vera Nagel 0]

Ok i need the for dummy's help here,

 

i had a blank for the living flag on many people, i tried to use TMG utility but found that only works if you have a ?, i had a blank

so i tried various things to get a flag for people and some how i have managed to make my own living flag set to N ,

 

i am fairly sure i am still living,

 

so i need the best way to clear all and start over from scratch, to get all my living flags in order,

 

Thanks

Kristina

 

Kristina,

 

the LIVING flag is a standard -and therefore **non-editable**- flag within TMG having ONLY 3 valid values = ?,N,Y

So when you are saying that "many people had a BLANK for the LIVING flag" that's an invalid value for that flag from TMG's perspective as well as from TMG Utilities perspective.

 

That being said the first step needs to be to identify all people within your project having the value for LIVING set to blank.

This can be done using a "List of People" report with a filter condition.

 

For details please see post#5 by Michael Hannah in this thread

 

http://www.whollygenes.com/forums201/index...ost&p=40087

 

Follow the instructions and I hope that will also work for you. Please keep us posted.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Kristina,

 

If you have really managed to set many LIVING flags to values that don't make sense, you could do a variation on my earlier post to "clear all and start over from scratch".

 

First, run that "List of People" report mentioned in the other posting to get all non-valid values set to '?'. (If you were wondering, some users have reported that non-valid values seem to occur as a result of some kinds of import from other programs.)

 

Now that you have everyone with a valid value, run a second "List of People" report with a filter as follows:

LIVING equals Y OR

LIVING equals N END

This should identify all people with a LIVING flag that is not '?', which is the only other valid value. Then in the Secondary Output of this report I would set the LIVING flag for all these people to '?'. This will now set everyone in your dataset to the value '?'.

 

Finally, I would now use the TMG Utility to change all appropriate people with a '?' to 'N'.

 

As a result of these two reports and the Utility, all people will have their LIVING flag set either as '?' or 'N' but no one will have 'Y'. This should not be a problem in TMG. I may be missing something, but all checks within TMG that I am aware of that use the LIVING flag only look for the value of 'N'. This is true of both the conditional sentence variables (see TMG Help under "Conditional Variables" subtopic "Living or Not Living") as well as suppressing details for living people in reports (for example see TMG Help under "GEDCOM export" subtopic "Suppress Details for Living People").

 

Running these two LOP reports followed by John Cardinal's wonderful TMG Utility (have you made a donation yet?) should set all the LIVING flags in your dataset to meaningful values.

 

Hope this does what you wanted,

 

P.S. Always do a Backup first before doing such global actions to a project, just in case.

[Jim Byram 0]

Michael,

 

First, run that "List of People" report mentioned in the other posting to get all non-valid values set to '?'. (If you were wondering, some users have reported that non-valid values seem to occur as a result of some kinds of import from other programs.)

 

Now that you have everyone with a valid value, run a second "List of People" report with a filter as follows:

LIVING equals Y OR

LIVING equals N END

This should identify all people with a LIVING flag that is not '?', which is the only other valid value. Then in the Secondary Output of this report I would set the LIVING flag for all these people to '?'. This will now set everyone in your dataset to the value '?'.

Why two steps?

Run the List of People report and use the Secondary Output tab to set the value for all people to '?' as the starting step. Filters and two runs are not required.

 

Then use Tmg Utility to set the Living flag for people appropriately.

 

Jim

[kahuja 0]

yes that is what happened it was an import from another program that caused me to get blanks, i havent bothered with it bc the filters and conditions baffle me, and some how i can not comprehend it to set my flags appropriately.

 

i export my file to my website and rootsweb and want to make sure no living people are displayed, which i think i have successfully done, but i always end up with some ancestors in the 1700's who are also blocked as living,

 

so i tried John's utility, (of course contributing)which i guess worked but then i saw the other post about how some imports ended up with a blank value for the living flag, checked and sure enough i had blanks, for ancestors who died 200 years ago.

 

so i tried a few conditions and ended making my own flag set to Living =N??

 

ok have done as suggested,

still unclear as to why the living flag is never Y,

i read the topics Michael suggested, my understanding is during an export only Living =N is searched for, is that correct? so anything else is assumed living (flag with ? value)and will be blocked out.

 

Is it best to leave it that way or is there another step i can now take to set the living from ? to the appropriate Y or N and eliminate the ?.

 

Thanks so much everyone

 

Kristina

[Jim Byram 0]

You really don't need to have anyone's flag set to 'Y'. '?' and 'N' should suffice. You assume that anyone set to '?' is potentially living and you only want to put people online who have the flag set to 'N'. That's why TMG Utility focuses on setting the Living flag to 'N'.

 

You can always reset every one to '?' and work through using TMG utility until you get things like you want them. And there will always be some people who might need to have the flag set manually.