There is no problem transmitting more or less than 4 location fields with Gedcoms - a Gedcom transmits the whole location field as text string with as many "fields" as it has. I think most recent genealogy programs accept the whole string as Legacy does.
Why sort the location list?
To bring together all locations in a particular county or town or whatever I presume - that's the reason I sort anyway.
You can currently do this with a right sort.
I enter all locations from smallest unit to largest, ending with the country - for some I only have 1 field as I only know the country, most have 3 or more ending in town, state (Australia) or county (England), country. I'm very consistent. Locations for each country (or part of a country perhaps) have a particular logical/local structure. I even have a few locations ending town, county, Michigan, USA. ;-)
A right sort brings all locations in a country together. It brings all locations in a state together. It brings all locations in a town together.
However I can't bring the state or the town to the front. This is what I'd like to be able to do. The current generic sort options only work if you enter everything with the same number of fields.
If location fields were numbered from the right instead of the left (with 1 = country) you could do this - so long as you are consistent in the way you enter locations for each country.
Then you could type the name of the town and be taken straight to all locations in that town. Currently I have to type say: Australia, Western Australia, Dalwallinu to get to all the locations I have for that town. (Yes I'm one of those who add cemeteries, churches, street addresses, house or farm names in the location)
It's no problem that bringing 3 to the front would actually bring the county to the front for the few USA locations I have. I'd simply ignore them, just like I ignore the English locations when I'm working with Australian locations.
You could also go straight to the right section if the location Find could be used as "contains" rather than "starts with".
Certainly, we don't want to go backwards and have separate fields/boxes for each part of a location.
Cheers, Cathy
At 12:58 11/12/2004, you wrote:-
I'm glad to hear that Geoff has made a commitment for Legacy to go back to the basics for entering places, even if he's not committing to any particular release. <snip> I guess my point is that even to handle the variety of stuff going on in the USA requires a more flexible method of place entry than to insist on a fixed number of jurisdictions.
There are two ways to deal with this, it seems to me. 1) Give up on all structure and allow one to put in any kind of text string without insisting on any number of sub districts and any number of commas to delineate them. 2) Set up a fairly complex structure with separate fields for States, Towns, Counties, Cities, Provinces, Boroughs, etc, and then allow the user on an individual place basis to arrange these in any order. That should keep a few programmers busy for a lifetime or two!
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