Addon:Historical Context

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English  • français

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Historical Events for Blanco, Daniel (1752-1805) from the example.tree

Historical Context gramplet

This gramplet is a recent development released into the Addon Manager distribution system. Some of the documentation is currently in the GitHub (online code development management system) repository of Kaj Mikkelsen. Review the README.md in the HistContext repository.

The basic concept is that the events in world history during a Person's lifetime provide context to the other events of their life. So the default lists of world events might include pandemics, wars and other socio-political pressures. You can edit the lists or add your own. So you might make a list of genealogical record stores that are valuable to be checked for specific eras.

Available in the Dashboard, People and Relationship category views, this Gramplet displays historical events that occurred within the lifespan of the active person. It references lists which have the start year, end year, the Event descriptions and a URL about that Event.

A double-click on a row will open your preferred browser at the provided Link.

Configuration options dialog for version 0.2.26

Configuration options

The View -> Configure... offers a variety of filtering options for the lists of Events.

  • Filter string - excludes Events where the "Text" column starts with a particular exact string
If the string is set to "Cen", then all lines where the text starts with "Cen" will be filtered out. (i.e., "Census" as well as "Century")
  • Use filter - deselected by default,enables the filter if selected
  • Hide outside life span - selected by default, show only those in the life span of the Active Person.
  • Files -
  • Foreground color items in lifespan - (black, default) text color
  • Background color items in lifespan - (white, default) shading
#ffffef pale yellow in screen capture
  • Foreground color items outside lifespan - (black, default) text color
#a00000 dark red in screen capture
  • Background color items outside lifespan - (light grey, default) shading

File locations

Event Lists

The Historical Context event lists are CSV lists of dated Historical Events (with the semicolon as the delimiter) that are loaded and compared against the lifespan (birth year through death year) of the Active Person. These files can be changed with any editor that saves in plain text.

If you have created a custom Event file (named custom_v1_0.txt) then those Events will be merged into the list. After creating the custom Event file, adding it as a Media object means the file will be included in backups with media. And if the default viewer for .txt files is a text editor instead of a simple view, then you can use Gramps to add or remove Events from its historical event list.

The format is one Event per line, each line. Short lines or those with too few (less than 3) delimiters will be skipped:

start date;end date;description;URL hotlink

For Events that only last one year, enter the same year for both start and end date. For ongoing Events, use Today for the end year. If either of the dates are missing, the gramplet assumes a life span of the Preferences limit for "Maximum age probably alive".

When entering a URL from services like wikipedia, remove the subdomain language (i.e., en. for english) or platform (e.g., m. for mobile indicator subdomain). This allows wikipedia to adapt to the target machine.

configuration options

The customizations for this Gramplet are stored in 3 locations: a common HistContext.ini the the gramplet's folder, distributed splitbar .ini files for each view mode (e.g., People_personlistview_sidebar.ini in the gramps/gramps52 folder) and the gramps.ini file in the Gramps User Directory.

The undocked size options are saved independently in the .ini files for the splitbars in each view mode. The gramps.ini file merely has the window position for the undocked dashboard gramplet. 

[HistContext]
name=HistContext
height=20
expand=True
detached_width=602
detached_height=496
state=maximized
help_url=Addon:Historical_Context
navtypes=['Person', 'Dashboard']
page=3

Configuration options are saved in the HistContext.ini found in the addon's subdirectory in the gramps/gramps52/HistContext.ini file. Once the View -> Configuration is uses and saved, there will be HistContext.ini in the addon folder with the options: 

[myopt]
;;bg_sel_col='#ffffff'
;;bg_usel_col='#ededed'
;;fg_sel_col='#000000'
;;fg_usel_col='#000000'
;;files='custom_v1_0.txt'
;;filter_text='String in beginning of text'
;;hide_outside_span=1
;;use_filter=0


alternative Color Picker

Click on any color swatch in the Colors tab of the Edit -> Preferences to show the palette Pick a Color dialog. Then click the + button in the Custom colors at the bottom to show the color picker. Copy the value to the Historical Context options. Cancel the gradient Pick a Color dialogs.

"Pick a Color" - palette selector dialog
"Pick a Color" - gradient selector dialog


See Also

Retrieved from "https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Addon:Historical_Context&oldid=109083"