Fanchart in 4.0, what features?

Hacking Fanchart

I don’t know if the fanchart has many fans. I don’t really use it myself. However, with the Gtk 3 conversion, I had to jump into the code to make it ready for Gramps 4.0. Now that I understood the code somewhat, I thought, what the heck, let’s add some features I learned from converting the pedigree. So I did some code cleanup, and started adding some features

New Features

Have a look at a screenshot of the current version in Gramps 4.0. Looks pretty much the same. Do you see the difference? Yes, in Gramps 3.4 there are no tooltips. Here is the full list of changes:

  1. When hover over a cell, a tooltip is displayed with name, date and place of birth, date and place of death
  2. The fanchart is now shown in a scrolled view. So normally you can scroll the view to see pieces of the fanchart not visible
  3. Translating the fanchart in the view remains possible, however, now only from the black dot in the center. In 3.4 the entire center person can be used to move the chart
  4. The reason for the above limitation, is that now you can drag a person from the chart to the clipboard. So the center person can now be dragged from the white area to the clipboard. Like this, the behavior is like on the pedigreeview.

What other features?

There are some other things that are possible, but as I haven”t used fanchart myself, you should let me know if they are interesting. Some ideas:

  1. Allow a config to use only colouring of male/female/unknown like in the pedigreeview. I think that might be nice also. In Gramps 4.0 the box color for male/female can be set in the preferences
  2. Allow drop of person on the chart. Dropping a person could have two actions: add as child of shown parents, or add as parent. Perhaps even nicer if we show one section of empty boxes, so that you could drop the parent immediately in a box? I think this would be nice, but on the other hand, who will ever create families in this way?
  3. Add a diamond on the intersection of a person and it’s two parents. Right click on the diamond could then be context menu to edit the family instead of the person. And we could show alternative parents there. Eg, birth parent could be filled black side, otherwise empty, and some indication if there are more than 1 family (eg circle instead of diamond)

Any other ideas? Any of my ideas you think would really be helpfull?

6 Comments

  • Janina

    Hello Benny,

    I just migrated my data to gramps and started with a general cleanup of the data and merged also all collected hand-written notes with the database. Therefore I want to printout afterwards all my family group reports afterwards to have the basis for further discussions with the family members. Therefore might it be possible to select all families in the database for generating family group reports for all families?

    Best regards,

    Janina

  • Benny

    The family group report has a recursive option, if you click it, then all children etc are also on the report.

    People find that easiest to discuss with family members. You could do a feature request to allow for all families. Note that via the book report, you can combine these recursive family group reports of different ‘root’ people in one book.

    Questions like these are best asked on the gramps-users mailing list

  • Jérôme

    It sounds good.
    Thank you!

  • Gramps » Fanchart: from Gimmick to Research Tool?

    […] Fanchart in 4.0, what features? […]

  • Kika

    Is there a family tree view that include all the descendants for one person??
    I am new in Gramps, but what I like to do is create is an extended family tree starting with my great granparents, all their children, with their spouses and children, meaning 4 generations with all the descendants!
    Is that posible??
    Sorry if my english sucks!!! is not my native languaje

  • Benny

    You can ask such questions on the user mailing list.
    You see all descendants in the relationship view, but that does not show a good overview. Then there is the descendant gramplet. You can detach this gramplet and put it next to gramps main screen while you are working.
    You should also check out the 3rd party plugin views. You can download those, and some might have descendants.
    In future version, the fanchart will have also all descendants

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