Dynamic Groups in Rootsmagic

What are they?, do I want them? and how will they work?

Well firstly Dynamic Groups do not exist yet in Rootsmagic despite being alluded to back in October 2008 almost two years ago on the Rootsmagic Blog. Named Groups were a new feature introduced into Rootsmagic 4 on the new sidebar and whilst this is a great new feature the Named Groups are currently Static rather than Dynamic. (click any images to enlarge)

So what's the difference?, well if you create a Named Group of all ancestors of yourself, that may amount to 500 or more people so everytime you select that group those are the people that are displayed, this is a static group.

If you later find a new ancestor and add them to your database they will not automatically become included in the Named Group you created previously, that would be Dynamic operation and what is desired.

At present you would have to recreate the Group as there is currently, in version 4.0.9.6, no way to refresh that Group to include the newly found individual.

When creating a group you have various ways to do this which are all shown under the Mark Group dropdown list visible in the previous image. There have been wishes to include more possibilities here but Rootsmagic is pretty well covered at present in my opinion.

One of the more powerful features is under "Select people by data fields" where you can pretty much define quite smart criteria for those you want to include.

In this example we are looking for anyone with a surname sounding like Eggleton, who we do have a death date for and that date is after 1850, they had some connection through their events with Pennsylvania and we do not currently have the Place Details entered for their burial location.

Pretty smart stuff eh!, this Named Group now forms a kind of To-Do list for me to work on finding those burial sites and bringing my database fully up to date so very useful.

However there is something I would almost see as a programming oversight, clicking on the People tab should virtually give us an onscreen report showing only those individuals displayed in the sidebar, we could then double click those listed and correct/add missing information. Unfortunately Rootsmagic always displays the complete database on the People view regardless of the sidebar selection, something I believe should be addressed in the future.

This all has great potential for the future and with the ability to customize the People view to your own requirements there are a lot of possibilities here. One that springs to mind immediately is the ability to create another People Tab with different layout rather like worksheet tabs in Excel, those users with large screen areas can have a lot of customized views for different reporting needs.

One main hurdle is the need for Dynamic Operation of Named Groups. If in my example I now add Burial Place Details for one of those reported they should then automatically disappear from that Named Group as they no longer fit the criteria for those Group members. I would then continue to work a group such as this exception group until all missing details are found and entered.

The building blocks are now in place in Rootsmagic 4 to fulfil two wishes that go back as long as I remember and well into Family Origins days :-

• On Screen Reporting (a great use for additional People View type tabs)  
• Stored find criteria where the user doesn't have to remember exactly how he set up the find the last time he used the database. (Dynamic groups are essentially this)  

Any stored find criteria should be visible when Edit Group is selected and of course the user should then be allowed to change and tweak the find criteria to suit their current needs.

Lets hope in the not too distant future some of these logical developments start to become a reality and Rootsmagic becomes the most useful tool on the market for those wanting to drill deeper into their genealogy, read the original release blog on groups here.