Focus Groups

[RuthAppleby 0]

Can anyone tell me where focus groups are stored, once created?    I have searched my computer but can't find any at all, but they appear as a drop-down list when needed.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Ruth,

As I replied to your question on FB, if you look at the File Structure page on Lee Hoffman's site -- http://www.tmgtips.com/dbnames2.htm -- you can see in the TMG 5,6,7,8 section (yellow background) the S and O Project files are were the Focus Groups information is stored.  

[RuthAppleby 0]

Sorry Terry - didn't see your reply on FB.  Having looked at the page you reference I am still none the wiser!  i am not a techy person to that extent, so am looking for a simple response e.g. they are stored at c:/users/.....  Can you help?

Edited February 20, 2020 by RuthAppleby

[Terry Reigel 0]

Ruth,

They are with all the other Project Files. By default, that is C:\Users\{user}\Documents\The Master Genealogist v7\Data\Projects, I think it is. You can see where it is in your case by going to Help > Access Folders and selecting the User Data item on the list that appears. Dismiss the warning and the user data folder on your system will open. The open the Projects subfolder (and any further subfolders if you have put your Projects in separate folders). 

The files you are looking for have names like {project name}_S.CDX and {project name}_O.DBF

There's nothing really you can do with them. You can't really even read them with a database reader.

 

[Jim Byram 0]

Ruth,

As Terry writes, focus groups are part of the TMG database. The only way that you can edit them are by using the Focus Groups tool in TMG.

Using the Save and Load convention makes it appear that focus groups are external files but they are not.

[Lee 0]

Actually, like most things in TMG, Focus Groups aren’t stored in a single place.  The Focus Group itself (the name and an assigned number within TMG) is stored in the “O” table as Terry mentioned.  But to find the members of a Focus Group, you need to go to the “B” table.  The “B” table lists the Focus Groups by group number and then each member by person number.  But, note that “person number” is not necessarily the same as the Person ID#, so you need to refer to the “N” table to get the the name of the member  .

While you can read the various tables to find out about Focus Groups (or any other part of a TMG project), you really don’t want to make any changes in a database manager as a change to one table can affect many other tables.  Any editing should only be done within TMG as Jim said.

Lee