Kith and Kin Pro manual - Adding and maintaining user-defined fields

From the Options menu select User fields and then Person to modify fields for person data (People table) or Family to modify fields for family data (Families table).

As well as storing data in the standard person and family fields (eg. Surname, Marriage date, etc) you can add your own "user-defined" fields to the database. GEDCOM supports some additional fields which you may want to add to your database, although you can give them your own name. You can also add new fields which have no corresponding GEDCOM tag. The name you use for the field is used as the description in printouts. For example, a new field named "Occupation" might contain the string "Farmer" in one particular person's data record. This would appear in a Details report as "Occupation: Farmer".

Changes to the user-defined fields only apply to the current database. When you subsequently create a new database, any user-defined fields will be copied to the new database;

Using the User defined fields form:

The "User fields" list shows all the user-defined fields currently in the database for the person or family table.

Adding a new field:

Enter a unique name for the field in the "Field name" box. Field names must start with a letter (A to Z). The new name must not already exist in the table; for example the fields "Birth date" and "Changed" are already part of the People table.

From the "Field type" drop-down list choose a data type which is suitable for the type of data you intend to store in the new field. The following field types are available:

String - Character or string field; 1 to 255 characters

Small integer - 16-bit integer field; whole numbers in the range -32767 to 32767

Integer - 32-bit integer field; whole numbers in the range -2147483648 to 2147483647

Logical - Boolean field; "true" or "false"

Decimal - Floating-point numeric field; -10E307 to 10E308 with 15 significant digits

Currency - Money field; a decimal field formatted to display decimal places and a money symbol

Date - Date field

If the field type is "String" then you must specify the maximum string length to be held in this field by entering a number between 1 and 255 in the "String size" box. Try not to make the length any longer than you need because the disk space used by every record in the table will be increased by this size.

You can associate a GEDCOM tag with the new field if you want the field to participate in GEDCOM file operations (import and export). Different tags are available for people and families. For example, if you have added an "Occupation" field you could associate the GEDCOM tag "OCCU" with this field. Now when you import a GEDCOM file, any data with a "OCCU" tag will be put in the "Occupation" field. The "GEDCOM tag" list shows all the available tags, some have sub-tags which are accessed by clicking on the small "+" beside the main tag. Clicking on a tag will make the expanded tag appear in the box above the list; so clicking on "AGE" in the "DEAT" tag will display "INDI DEAT AGE", indicating that this field relates to the AGE tag subordinate to the DEAT tag subordinate to the INDI (individual) tag in a GEDCOM file. It requires some knowledge of GEDCOM to know which tags are likely to contain the data. For example "INDI OCCU" normally contains the description of an occupation, even though there are other tags subordinate to this, while "INDI BIRT" never has any data, only its subordinate tags.

When all of these settings have been made, and they are valid, the Add button will be enabled. Click on the Add button to add the new field to the database.

Changing the properties of an existing field:

You may want to change the definition of an existing user-defined field. For instance, you may want to change the field name, the field type or the length of string which the field can hold.

Click on the field name in the "User fields" list. The current properties of the field will appear in the "Field name", "Field type", "String size" and "GEDCOM tag" boxes. Modify these properties as required (see "Adding a new field" above) and if the new properties are valid, click on the Change button.

If the field type or string size has changed, Kith and Kin Pro will attempt to modify any existing data in this field so that it makes sense in the modified field. For instance, when changing a String field to an Integer field the program will copy any numeric data across but any non numeric data will result in a 0 field value. Warning: for this reason it is possible to lose data when changing a field type.

Deleting a field:

You can delete an existing user-defined field.

Click on the field name in the "User fields" list. Click on the Delete button. Warning: all data in this field will be lost.

Adding and maintaining user-defined fields

See also