Delete large group of people

[DougG 0]

My TMG database goes back to when it was a DOS program (!) and my early days of genealogy when I wasn't very careful about things like sources and who I got my info from. Now I have identified a large group of 436 people who are interrelated but have been "cut off" from any relationship with the legitimate members of my family tree by removing some child-parent links. By using the List of People report to set a custom flag, I have all of these people flagged and can filter them in the Project Explorer, make them into a Focus Group, etc., but what I can't seem to do is to simply DELETE them from the database!

 

One technique that was suggested was to Move them to a new dataset and then delete that dataset. Unfortunately, that doesn't work, as TMG fails on some sort of missing RULESET var and then hangs until aborted. Doing a Delete Persons against the filtered Project Explorer also doesn't work since it says that one or more has "relationships", which of course is true (within that group of people).

 

TMG Help tells me that I can't delete a person until I delete all their tags, but that would be unbelievably tedious for 436 people (and no mass tag-delete function that I can see).

 

So is there any way to do this?

 

Doug Gordon

[Terry Reigel 0]

Doug,

 

The only method I know for a mass delete is to move them to another data set as you have tried. I think the only solution is to find the source of the error you are getting.

[DougG 0]

Doug,

 

The only method I know for a mass delete is to move them to another data set as you have tried. I think the only solution is to find the source of the error you are getting.

Unfortunately, it looks like some sort of internal error that I have no hope of debugging. I also hate to mess with it too much as it's already caused me to have to go through a database error recovery, etc. At least I worked out a way to exclude them from my SecondSite pages, which was one of my main objectives.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Doug,

Since you have a flag set, you might try the reverse logic. Create a new project of everyone who does NOT have the flag set.

[DougG 0]

Doug, Since you have a flag set, you might try the reverse logic. Create a new project of everyone who does NOT have the flag set.

Thanks, Michael. I might try that and see how well it works -- especially since it would be a non-destructive process. I'll also be interested to see what it does with the external exhibits, custom flags and accent colors, etc. Would this also transfer or will I have to recreate customizations (the only accent I use is for indicating my direct-line ancestors/descendants)?

[DougG 0]

I was able to accomplish my goal by using Michael's suggestion, although it seems really weird to have the "report writer" be the gateway to creating a new project. I was also thankful for my "Crashplan" online backup software, as the problems I was having with TMG did cause corruption and a missing DBF file. So I was able to use Crashplan to restore all the files in my project directory to the state they were in just prior to when I started messing with them. This was even easier than using the built-in backup/restore.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Glad it worked, Doug. I have often found that "reverse" logic is useful when I cannot seem to get directly what I want.

 

While I agree it seems weird to have the Report options be the gateway to creating a new project, I would guess it was done this way to take advantage of the comprehensive filtering capability available to reports.