In message <1337971268.45401.YahooMailClassic@web162104.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>, Marsha Ensminger <marshaensminger@yahoo.com> writes: >John, > >If you're considering a change to the file structure, I would suggest a >radical change. Break up the single location field into multiple >fields, as "The Master Genealogist" does. Can I second this one? I use hierarchical with commas - for Britain, I use town (or village), county, country, with anything below town (e. g. house number and street name) in the comment field. I do this so that if I create a listing by location, events in the same town/village come together - if I included the house number and street in the location field, then any listing by location would have hundreds of locations, each with only one or two events in it. For USA/Canada locations, I use town (or whatever), state/province, country. (As I've mentioned before, I wish I'd used the inverse order - country first - so that a listing by location put all the England locations together, rather than putting Newcastle, Northumberland, England, next to New York, New York, USA.) [] >Of course, if you were to break up the location field there would be >issues in converting "old" BK data to the "new" format. TMG's import I suppose there could be a tickbox to select between the two formats, with the default for new entries being one of the configurable options. >routine did a pretty good job of separating the component parts and >assigning them to the appropriate fields. I suspect the commas I used >had something to do with it. Did/do you enter blank commas for unknown details (so, for my scheme, if all you knew was that it was England, you'd put ", , England")? > >Also of course, whatever labels you assign to the various fields will >cause dissension among users. What works for me won't please Otto... I >don't know if there's a way for you to structure them as "field 1", >"field 2", and so on and then allow the individual users to add names >that make sense to them. Though that could be done by manipulating the language file, as discussed (for some other reason) here recently. > >Marsha L. Ensminger > > >--- On Fri, 5/25/12, John Steed <brothers_keeper@msn.com> wrote: > >> From: John Steed <brothers_keeper@msn.com> [] >> files.  I can not >> change them without creating new data files for a different >> version of BK in >> the future. (Should you ever do this, perhaps a non-fixed length - with a size byte/doublebyte and/or a null-terminator - might avoid the need four even further changes, until people want more than 64K characters anyway!) [] -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Live Faust, die Jung.