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    Apparent event sorting bug

    I tried event sorting for the first time today. Created settings with a template in the "Change" nav section
    Then went to a specific couple where I new a few events were out of order (compare to what I wanted)
    I opened the events view of the husband and clicked on "Sort Events". Nothing changed, more on that later
    Just to make sure, I tried going to the Change panel and do the sort from there.
    I made sure "Sort Events for…" was selected to "Source couple"
    I set an events template of my preferences and "Use Event Template"
    Selected "When Finished" mark no one
    Clicked on "Sort"
    This was the result
    Screen Shot 2020-12-02 at 23.34.43.png
    Much to my dismay the feedback (at the bottom) indicated my whole database had undergone event sorting! It would be exhaustive to check all 7568 people if it was what I wanted, let alone that I did not have them marked to do so.

    So, do I misunderstand how this is supposed to be used for a single couple? If the answer is no, this is a very problematic bug. Luckily for me I am not all that trusting, so I had made a backup just before. Phew...

    Now to the "apparently nothing changed". I figured out why nothing happened. You can see the template I used above. Below is the event panel before sorting:
    Screen Shot 2020-12-02 at 23.42.46.png
    My first explanation for nothing happening is that Reunion does not know what to do with the events that have an "about" date. Those events do have a date (although be it somewhat qualified), including a year, as opposed to being empty. I expected them to be sorted according to that date without qualifier. This may actually still have happened because when I changed the birth date to "abt 7 dec 1733" and sorted again it was placed before christening.

    Then I discovered that if I play death before burial and sort, it gets moved to after burial. So now I am thinking that equivalent dates with "abt" in one of them always have the "abt" one sorted later. That does not seem a wise decision.

    Somehow I had expected the event template's order to also be used to resolve the order of two events otherwise sorting equally. So may be this is not a bug, but I would put in a strong request to implement that.

    Overall I would suggest: For purposes of sorting
    Treat fields without a year as "empty"
    Treat fields with a year but an abt qualifier as well as if the qualifier was not there
    Treat fields with a year, but a "ca" qualifier is if it was not there (one could argue that ca is less precise than abt, so I could live with these being treated as empty)
    Now sort by date
    Now take any events that are not empty (no date with year, but something in place or memo or both), with types in the order they appear in the template (this is assuming template use is selected)
    Place them after the last event of the type before it in the template
    If there are multiple of these with the same event type, preserve their original order

    #2
    To help this process at least a little bit, I'd suggest changing how you enter dates...

    If you know the christening date exactly, then for the birth date, enter "before 8 Dec 1733" rather than "abt". Then the dates would sort into the expected order.

    Same for the Death/Burial date pair - make the death "bef" rather than "abt".

    And similarly in the opposite situation - if you know the birth, but not the christening, then enter the Christening as "aft 8 Dec 1733" and it will sort after the birth as expected.

    Roger
    Roger Moffat
    http://lisaandroger.com/genealogy/
    http://genealogy.clanmoffat.org/

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      #3
      While that may help this particular issue, the proposed "solution" is not workable for me. I remember I tried this in the past and ran into other "date" issues as a result, although I cannot remember the exact issues. In addition "bef <date>" while logically true, connotes "any" date before. "abt <date>" connected a date in the vicinity, whereas "ca <date>" connotes a broader date range. This has been discussed many times before.

      I do realize "abt <date>" theoretically could include dates after that but context makes it clear it could not be after the christening. So overall I want to use "abt" and I think my proposed behavior does not harm any of the already existing behaviors, so that people who prefer "bef" for this scenario could still use it that way.

      Additionally, the proposed sorting enhances the sorting functionality in other ways, so my proposal/request stands.

      Comment


        #4
        Using bef is the fix that I used in the above situations but... as dolfs notes it is a catchall that includes a broad date range. I just accept that it is better to have a date than no date and now drop bef or aft or abt. i.e. christening 1 Jan 1880 then birth 1879 (ignoring delayed christenings and in the belief that at some point the birth date will be revealed). A better fix would be for Reunion, not the user, to always sort christening after birth - burial after death then flag the error if the user or the record gets the dates incorrect!
        Dave Walton
        Tree - Walton, Haggerston, Chambers, Munro, Haught, Schlager, Scannell...
        iMac M1, Macbook Air M2, MacOS Ventura 13.2, Reunion 13

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