Duplicate record pop-up

Add your enhancement requests to our ToDo list.
Post Reply
User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Duplicate record pop-up

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Jul 02, 2008 10:35 pm

Originally posted by curriouscat

This has been an interesting addition. It is a great idea to have a tool to detect if the new person is already in the database. To make it more useful, could you restrict the search a little? If it pops up too often when there is no duplicate, it will lose its effect. The pop-up has appeared on my screen 3-400 times in the last 2 weeks. It was of use just once when I was about to add a duplicate.
  • It throws up all the people for whom I have no family name - mainly women. For example, I have about 400 Elizas and Sarahs and Marys with no family name and each time I add another, the pop-up appears. There is no way to tell one Eliza, Mary or Sarah from another. So that warning is not useful. Could you eliminate those with no family name from the search?
  • It also appears when I am adding the son with the same name as the father. Or, a father with the same name as a son or grandson. A very common practice. Could you not show the pop-up for people who are in a direct line relationship?
  • This might be more difficult. Many of those women without family names often get one when I do a bit more work. However, the database action now is an update not an insert, so the check is not done. It would be good to know if the update person is now a duplicate. However, a record can be updated for many reason and many times - not just a name change.
I've also noticed that this is the first mod to iFamily that has slowed it down. I've currently got about 10,400 names and climbing. Before this mod, there was no pause when entering a person. Now, there is a noticeable 1-2 second pause before iFamily responds. I'm using the latest iMac with the latest s/w.

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Duplicate record pop-up

Post by Keith Wilson » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:36 am

Hi

I will address the duplicate names dialog in the next release of iFamily. In the meantime, for married women with no family name you may like to enter them as:

Eliza (SMITH) where SMITH is her married name - or something like that.

If you are running on OSX 10.5 (Leopard) then the duplicate names dialog will display much faster than when using iFamily on OSX 10.4 (Tiger).

What version of the Mac Operating System are you using, ie, OSX 10.??

I also see a problem - when I re-activated the " duplicate name warning" in V2.398 I omitted to reinstate the user option to turn it ON/OFF.

In the meantime there is a simple get-around as follows:

In V2.403 the function that does the check for duplicate names does not remove double spaces within a name before doing its comparisons. If you enter the name in a ghost box in the Context Diagram as " John SMITH" then this will not be the regarded the as being the same as " John SMITH" . This does not apply if you enter the name into a text box elsewhere because extra embedded spaces are removed before the duplicates check is done. Whatever you enter all extra spaces will be stripped by a subsequent function before the name is saved to the database.

It's actually all a bit tacky, isn't it?

In V2.404 I have reinstated the user option to warn or not warn about duplicates (and fixed the tacky part of the code).

Keith

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Duplicate record pop-up

Post by Keith Wilson » Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:33 am

Originally posted by curriouscat

Keith,

This is an extremely useful feature, especially when the tree gets large. Can you think about adding options to do
  • a 'soundex' search
  • a search on variant names
  • a search that does not depend on the order of names.
The first is to deal with all those annoying changes in spelling 'Louise' & 'Louisa', 'Allan' & 'Alan', 'Phillip' & 'Philip' etc.

The second is to deal with 'Eliza', 'Elizabeth', 'Betsy', 'Bess' & 'Beth', 'Henry' & 'Heinrich', 'Fred' & 'Frederick', 'Bill' & 'William'.

The third is to deal with 'Charles Albert Henry Smith' = 'Henry Albert Charles Smith'.

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Duplicate record pop-up

Post by Keith Wilson » Thu Jul 24, 2008 2:41 pm

curriouscat wrote:Keith,

This is an extremely useful feature, especially when the tree gets large. Can you think about adding options to do
  • a 'soundex' search
  • a search on variant names
  • a search that does not depend on the order of names.
The first is to deal with all those annoying changes in spelling 'Louise' & 'Louisa', 'Allan' & 'Alan', 'Phillip' & 'Philip' etc.

The second is to deal with 'Eliza', 'Elizabeth', 'Betsy', 'Bess' & 'Beth', 'Henry' & 'Heinrich', 'Fred' & 'Frederick', 'Bill' & 'William'.

The third is to deal with 'Charles Albert Henry Smith' = 'Henry Albert Charles Smith'.
Thanks, I will look at implementing something like the search that is in the Toolbar search field.

For the benefit of those who have not used the Toolbar search field much or who have forgotten how it works, then:

The search field at the RH end of the Toolbar has a drop-down menu that allows you to search on
  • Names
    Names & Titles
    Notes
    Comments
    Birth Place
    Death Place
    Birth Year
    Death Year
    Cause of Death
    Marriage Year
    Marriage Notes
    Personal Event Notes
    Numeric Id
    Reference Number
    Unconnected People
Entering a single space in the Toolbar search field will display a list of all the people in the database.

You can click on the headers in the search table to sort by Numeric Id or by Name.

This search is based on words that start with so if you are looking for 'Charles Albert Henry Smith' then entering any the 24 permutations of C A H S (i.e. C A S H, C A H S, C H A S, C H S A, ... S A C H, S C H S, .... ) will find him immediately. So when you enter Phil it will find Phil, Philip and Phillip, Phillipa and Philippa,...

Other search fields within iFamily may use different methods so you need to read the label in front of the field to decide what to enter. For instance the filter in Event Names is " Event Name contains" so if you enter " hoo" you will get all events that mention " school" .

iFamily does not recognise Betty as an alternative to Elizabeth, etc because the table of alternatives would have to multilingual and that is not a trivial exercise. People's ancestors often come from a variety of nationalities so it needs to be a table look-up that allows English and Polish and French and Italian and .... and the spellings of names have also changed over time.

Keith

Post Reply