Customize reports with XML tool
Families often have complicated structures, especially for Twenty-first century blended families. Generating reports that include the various relatives will yield a more complete picture of the family.
This article offers a less manual method to configure a Report's options as an alternative to the Gramps report interface.
Contents
Family Lines Graph
Creating a Family Lines Graph often involves carefully selecting multiple people to include, this is a slow process that recursively loads the Select Person dialog.
Gramps stores these selections in a file named report_options.xml
in the ~/.gramps
User directory. The report options are overwritten every time a graphical report is created.
It is possible to edit this file manually with a text editor, but that is a tedious and error-prone procedure.
Create a Bash script
The following bash script will take care of the process for Linux users. It includes backing up the current file and saving the list of Person IDs in a file that can be reused.
#!/bin/bash if [ $# -lt 1 ];then echo "Utility to replace list of People of Interest in Gramps Family Lines Graph." echo "The file 'report_options.xml' is overwritten after making a backup." echo "The current list of People of Interest is saved for possible reuse" echo "Usage: "$0" current_pid [new_pid]" echo " current_pid is the file name in which to save current pid list" echo " Optional. If present, new_pid is the name of the file containing" echo " the new pid list" echo " eg " $0" bigfamily.pid three_gen.pid" exit 1 fi gramps_home=~/.gramps/ #echo "gramps_home = "$gramps_home opts=$gramps_home"report_options.xml" #echo "opts = "$opts bak=$opts".bak" #echo "bak = "$bak echo "Backing up "$opts " to " $bak cp -irp $opts $bak echo "Saving current pid list to "$gramps_home$1 lxprintf -e 'module[@name="familylines_graph"]/option[@name="gidlist"]'\ "%s\n" @value $opts > $gramps_home$1 echo "Replacing pids in "$opts echo " with the contents of "$gramps_home$2 # replacing the xml in situ does not seem to work correctly # instead send it to a temporary file and copy lxreplace -q \ 'module[@name="familylines_graph"]/option[@name="gidlist"]' \ -@ '"value"' "'`cat $gramps_home$2`'" \ ~/.gramps/report_options.xml > /tmp/temp.xml cp -fv /tmp/temp.xml $opts 2>>/dev/null echo "Updated "$opts
Using the script
Copy the this code into a file, or get the most recent version of the script from github, and save it to a directory on your PATH.
You will also need the LTXML2 Toolkit from the Language Technology Group at Edinburgh University.
See also
- 18 Mar 2021 Family Lines Graph message thread in the Gramps-users maillist archive