Descendants report?

Are there plans to add a descendants report? Also are there plans to eventually add some options to further tweak some of the reports? For example to include additional facts in the report like baptism and burial information and so forth?

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Coincidentally, I just added a descendants report tonight. Click on the “Reports” tab and select “Descendancy (register format)”. There is currently a spacing problem in the report, but I will fix it tomorrow. Please let me know what you think!

This report is in MS Word format, which gives you a chance to edit the report before printing.

Furthermore, it is generated using the following template: https://www.rootsfinder.com/assets/docx/register-simple.docx If you look at this document, you’ll see that it’s a Word document written in a “report programming language”. Theoretically, this means that people could download this document, modify it, and then upload it to generate slightly-customized versions of the report. This “template” approach is the easiest way for me to let people generate customized reports, but the report programming language can be a bit complex and I’m not sure how many people would want to take advantage of this. What kind of tweaks did you have in mind?

The next report using this template approach will focus on one person at a time. It will include a person’s timeline, stories, notes, sources, and pictures :slight_smile:

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DallanQ,
The Descendancy (register format) is very nice and using the template approach is great. Just wanted to let you know that when ran if descendant is living and previous descendant has passed, it will use the date of death on the living descendants along with the citation source in the footnotes.

I looked at the template but don;t have time right now to glean through and find where the issue is.

in any case great report.

Thank-you for pointing out that problem! I believe I have fixed it now.

I apologize for not replying sooner; I didn’t get notified about new forum messages last week.

DallanQ,

I am sorry I didn’t reply sooner, a lot of other things have come up and not so much time for genes these past few weeks. Thank you for adding the descendant report! I assume that report writing language is part of a Microsoft based tool?

So I guess the idea would be to have the standard set of reports and then have an option for a more advanced user to upload their own custom reporting templates. I guess that works if the user knows what data is available behind the scenes and how to reference it. Would you allow them to upload/store/run/delete their own templates associated with their own account? Share them with other users? Although with what you provide already I don’t see a huge demand or need for it.

Maybe make the choice of downloading in Word or in PDF format an option? For example I just played with a 11 generation ancestry report with media that is 586 MB in size and LibreOffice Writer under Fedora choked on it and complained it was corrupted. A PDF format document of that size would hopefully open and display fine.

Thanks,
Chris

Yes, the template is actually a MS word document with placeholders for data coming from the tree. I currently have two templates: one designed to show descendants and one designed to show ancestors. The ancestor template includes placeholders for media, stories, and sources - it looks like you’ve already found this. And yes, eventually I intend to allow people to upload and run their own templates (and share them with others if they want - or even share them with me and I’ll add them to the “official” list).

It looks like the most common solution for converting DOCX to PDF documents is to load them into LibreOffice, which may not help here since it’s choking on you. I’ll add this to the roadmap to look into other alternatives.