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solongago

My modified marriage tag

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Now that I have over 6,000 people in my database, I have decided to drastically modify the marriage tag sentence structure (thanks to the new reminder button in which I can keep track of "[R:Groom] || [R:Groom's father] || [R:Groom's mother] || [R:Bride] || [R:Bride's father] || [R:Bride's mother] || general memo." I cannot apply the new structure to the old entries without modifying the memo field of each, so I've created a new tag "Marriage1."

 

Is it possible to have <CTRL-M> bring up the new "Marriage1" tag instead of the old "Marriage" tag? Or is it possible to make all the old marriage tags "Marriage1" and then use my new sentence structure for "Marriage"?

 

Steve..

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If you create a "Marriage1" tag, you can use TMG Utility to change all the existing Marriage tags to Marriage1 tags. Then you could change the Marriage tag to have the structured memo you described. Ctrl-M would continue to add the Marriage tag, but that would have your customization.

 

I am not sure that's a good idea, however: if you ever add data via a merge, the Marriage tags added from the external dataset/project won't be the same as your customized Marriage tag. I think TMG will handle it properly, but still, it would be confusing.

 

Another alternative would be to add a Marriage1 tag that has the structured memo. Also add a custom button to the user toolbar, and click that button to add the Marriage1 tag. That will minimize the steps it takes to add the customized tag while leaving the standard tag in place.

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John & Terry,

 

Your comments about the standard tags that have a Ctrl-Key, such as Ctrl-M, associated with them brings up something I noticed a short while ago that TMG will allow you to do that is very dangerous.

 

I was somewhat surprised to see that TMG will allow you to edit not only the sentence structures of standard tags, as it certainly should, but also that you can edit the standard tag names themselves (which I'm not too sure is a good thing).

 

Thus, the OP of this topic could in theory play a shell-game with his tag names:

 

1. Change the name of his Marriage1 tag to something else, such as MarriageTemp.

2. Change the name of his Marriage tag to Marriage1.

3. Create a new tag called Marriage.

4. Copy the sentence structure from Marriage1 to Marriage to give it the original Marriage sentence structure.

5. Copy the sentence structure from MarriageTemp to Marriage1 to give it the original Marriage1 sentence structure.

6. Delete the MarriageTemp tag.

 

The result of these changes would be that Marriage1 would now be the tag with "Ctrl-M" associated with it.

 

However, it would also mean that every tag in the data that was originally named Marriage would now have been renamed Marriage1, and every tag that was originally named Marriage1 would now have been renamed Marriage.

 

It has taken me longer than I intended to reach the point here, which is, that I am not entirely sure that it is good that TMG allows the standard tags to be renamed. I actually stumbled across this by accident some time ago when I was in the process of creating new tags like Birth-Alt, and managed to rename my Birth tag somewhere along the line. Then I was really surprised when the Birth-Alt tag appeared every time I pressed Ctrl-B, rather than the Birth tag. It then took me a while to unscramble it all.

 

Mike Daugherty

Frederick, Maryland

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Mike,

 

I guess I don't see what the issue is. The keyboard shortcuts always bring up the standard tags, no matter what else you name them.

 

In any case, I'd think the ability to rename them is essential in order to be able to translate them into other languages.

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Terry,

 

Upon reflection, I guess the only issue is that it enables you to create a situation through re-naming that down the road can be quite difficult to go back and un-do. But since you have to go out of your way to cause the problem in the first place, it probably isn't really the problem that it first seemed to be to me. And being mono-lingual and with ancestors who are English, English and more English, I hadn't even considered the renaming necessity for other languages.

 

Thanks

 

Mike D.

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Mike,

The only time changing the name of one of the standard tags will affect you is if whollygenes, or a beta tester needs to fix the underlying database. I changed mine ages ago to B-Birth, M-Marriage, D-Death, so that all my Birth type tags would sort together, all the Death type tags would sort together, etc. Once I had to have the database fixed, and the person fixing it couldn't find my standard tags in the lists. Once I told them my names for them, it was not a problem. Undoing it is as simple as doing it. YOu just re-rename them. <G>

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Mike,

The only time changing the name of one of the standard tags will affect you is if whollygenes, or a beta tester needs to fix the underlying database. I changed mine ages ago to B-Birth, M-Marriage, D-Death, so that all my Birth type tags would sort together, all the Death type tags would sort together, etc. Once I had to have the database fixed, and the person fixing it couldn't find my standard tags in the lists. Once I told them my names for them, it was not a problem. Undoing it is as simple as doing it. YOu just re-rename them. <G>

 

Thanks for the info, Teresa.

 

Mike D.

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