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Can we please have an "Attach" button on viewed sources?

Julia Szent-Györgyi
Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
March 30, 2022 edited April 4, 2022 in Suggest an Idea

My godmother attached her ancestor's death record to the person's husband, parents, children, even (I think) a sister-in-law -- everyone except the ancestor it's actually for. If I go to an instance of the citation, I can click View and then Show All under "Attached To:" to see the extent of the problem, and to detach it from all of the people who aren't mentioned anywhere in the document, but I cannot attach it to the profile it should be on.

I can copy the citation to my Source Box and attach that to the correct profile, but it will be a copy, disconnected from the group. If I correct the title or transcription on my copy, it will not correct the other instances, and if I correct one of those instances (the ones that my godmother attached), it will not fix my copy. This is undesirable.

What I'd like is an Attach button just like the one in my Source Box:

image.png

This would also solve the problem of forgetting to check the "add to my source box" checkbox when creating a citation, which is currently a mistake that takes many steps to recover from.

Tagged:
  • New
  • Family Tree Enhancement
  • Research Enhancement
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New · Last Updated March 30, 2022

Comments

  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 30, 2022

    What tool is this?

    That film appears to be not indexed yet, and the URL goes to a page with lots of names on it: babies, both parents, other persons.

    0
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 30, 2022

    @dontiknowyou, as I said, it's the result if I go to the Sources tab on one of the profiles and "click View and then Show All under 'Attached To:'", and yes, it's unindexed. (That's kind of the point: you don't need group attachments for index-based citations.) Sorry that it wasn't as clear as I thought.

    1
  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 30, 2022

    Okay, I didn't recognize the color scheme but I am now oriented. This is why I avoid attaching FS historical records that aren't indexed yet. Also where it would be so nice to be able to share a Source Box with others.

    My thought is a quick and easy button like that would create more problems than it solves. But hm... I'll take a closer look.

    0
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 30, 2022

    If I had to wait for things to be indexed, I'd need to give up on genealogy for the next fifty years. Easily 90% of my sources are unindexed.

    2
  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    I understand. I have unindexed sources too. Wouldn't the ability to share a Source Box go a long way to addressing this?

    0
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    Shared boxes would require action from the other person, i.e. I'd need to roust up my godmother and try to explain things to her over the phone. (This would only be slightly less frustrating than trying to explain computer things to my mother.) But yes, if we could share, some of the problem would be solved. (It wouldn't help with "oh shucks, I forgot the dratted checkbox again".)

    1
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    An alternative that could both solve the problem of "unfinished group attachments" and allow for some sharing of source citations (without needing to bug the other person) would be to add an "import to my source box" option, instead of or in addition to the "copy to my source box" function. "Copy" breaks the chain: instances of the copy are not part of the group for the original. "Import" would need to preserve the chain: new instances would be added to the original group.

    0
  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    Perhaps rather than import the operative word would be share. Share from and/or share to...?

    0
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    Yeah, maybe "share" would make a better label.

    But an "attach" button to go with all the "detach" buttons would be a simpler solution. I'm not worried about people misusing it: that screen is not one that people encounter accidentally, and even if they do, any resulting spurious attachments would be very easy to clean up. (As it currently stands, if someone uses the "detach" buttons in error, that's a very difficult mess to recover from.)

    0
  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    Could I have a link to one of these PIDs with a group source attached? Perhaps in a PM? I'd like to take a closer look.

    0
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    Try this one: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/sources/attachedto/3KWP-BSP

    It's a funeral notice in German (which more people know than Hungarian, so maybe it'll be easier?). It lists 21 relatives plus the deceased. Of those, I've got it attached to six, so far. (Not all of the rest are in the Tree, yet, I think. Unless they're floating somewhere.)

    0
  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022

    @Julia Szent-Györgyi

    Thank you! Now I am oriented.

    Source Box has had a small redesign and color added, so at first I didn't recognize it and even after then I wasn't entirely sure that's what you were sharing. Now I know.

    I have some items in my Source Box that are attached to lots of profiles. It is a chore to go to each profile, one at a time, to attach the source. An easier way would be good to have.

    It isn't clear to me what would happen after someone clicks the Attach button in your mock-up. Would you want to attach to additional PIDs by PID, or pick them from a Recents list?

    What I usually do is open a descendancy tree and from there pop open the Sources page of each PID I want to attach the source to. I get to the Source Box from the target Sources page. I am actually very surprised that I can see your Attached list, and of course that means any other contributor must be able to see mine. But it makes sense, since anyone can detach anyone else's source, and I see why you want a button on this page to attach an item in someone else's Source Box onto other profiles. Still, it is kind of a kludge. If you detach a source in someone else's source box from the last source, there is no way for you to find it again, is there? In fact, I cannot find a route to this Attached list; your link to it is in your Source Box, isn't it?

    Okay, now my head hurts. Is there a system map anywhere? Even a home-made map of an explorer?

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  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    March 31, 2022 edited March 31, 2022

    OK, no, that's not my source box. I can't give you a link to my source box. The link in my previous post is what you get if you click on the citation on the Sources tab on one of the profiles it's attached to, choose "View", and then "Show All" in the Attached To section on the right.

    Source Boxes were recently enhanced, and that's where I got the "Attach" button image and my proposed functionality. To see it, go to a non-Community FS page, click your profile icon-and-name at the top right, and choose Source Box. For example, here's mine right now:

    image.png

    Notice all of those Attach buttons? They basically do exactly what you were ruminating about in your comment: they give you a choice between attaching by name, by ID, or from your Recents list.

    image.png

    I can see no reason that this functionality couldn't be added to the "View - Show All" listing for a source citation.

    0
  • dontiknowyou
    dontiknowyou ✭✭✭✭✭
    April 1, 2022

    Yeah, that's a lot of new functionality. I had not noticed the changes.

    0
  • Caleb L
    Caleb L mod
    April 4, 2022

    @Julia Szent-Györgyi thank you for the feedback. You explained your feedback very well and the screenshots are helpful. We will pass this along to the product managers for consideration.

    When you have a few minutes, you may want to skim through the other ideas posted in the "Suggest an Idea" category and vote on ideas you agree with. Voting helps illustrate to the product managers which ideas matter most to the community at large.

    0
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