On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 11:24 PM, Don Ferguson via <tmg-refugees@rootsweb.com > wrote: > I wouldn’t mind the RM approach if I could delete the ones I will never > use (like LDS and many purely US ones) and hide the ones I don’t want to > see, as I think I will probably never use them. Even a pure ‘hide’ > function would be OK, but I don’t see that in RM either. > There is really no need to delete or hide the built-in source templates but it can be done. Using SQLite, one could delete unused Source Templates from a database but that could prove counter-productive. These uneditable, built-in source templates are constant from database to database so that transfers of persons with sources between databases does not require a corresponding transfer of the source template specification. Thus a transfer to a database without the standard template for a source that used one would result in that source becoming phantomed. Custom source templates do require transfer of their specifications between databases and, as I think Jerry described, can result in duplicate sources failing to merge, e.g., a person with citations copied by drag'n'drop to another database and then back again may have such unmerged duplicate sources even though they are built from the seemingly identical custom source template. If built from a common built-in source template, they do merge. This is an unexpected and unwanted complication that I hope will someday be resolved. Users who exploit custom source templates have other alternatives to hiding or deleting the built-in ones. They prefix the name of the source template with a * or _ or some other character that sorts them to the top of the alphabetically sorted list of source template names and they use the Favorites and Recent lists when selecting a Source Type for a new Source. > > But your last comment about ‘the source is stuck with that Source Template > forever’ frightens me – that is also way too inflexible, methinks… > That is not absolutely true. Within RootsMagic, one can, for example, create a new Master Source based on a custom source template and merge a Source based on another template into it. As long as the two source templates have matching field names for non-empty fields in the original source and these field names are at the same levels (Master or Citation), nothing is lost. Again, for the daring, much more powerful and faster things can be done using SQLite queries. And there is promise of a source conversion facility someday... Tom