branch in stead of tree on the search page

[depolle]

Dear members,

In my data, I have quite a few people with no relation to my tree (yet). I have given them a different branch name.

Now, when I do a search, I always get the tree name displayed, but I would like to change that to the branch name. Is this possible? I am not a specialist in PHP.

Or, might this be a idea for a next release, where administrators would be able to chose which (branch or tree) one showed up on the search page.

Paul

http://www.lauryssens.info/Genea/index.php

[rocksea]

i also have been looking for this facility, to have branch option because i keep all the branches in one tree as it is easy to use.

[MaryTheresa]

As a trustee of the Apgar Family Association, I've been creating digital versions of books they published back in the 1980s. Eventually I am going to upgrade their site to include all of this data and plan on using TNG. Having branch search capability is a must as the Apgar tree starts with one family that came to the US in the 1730s and now has thousand of descendants.

I started playing with branch searches on a section of my own site (www.familyhistorians.net/apgar) that has some of this data, but has over 3000 families. Since I worked on this over a year ago, I couldn’t remember what I had done and was actually in the process of upgrading this part of my site to TNG 6.04 when I discovered late Thursday night that my site is one of the finalists for a Family Tree contest. I figured that I should get the site up for the voting so I took Friday off and have spent an intensive two + days recreating branch searches. A few of the pages are ready (surnames, notes, placesearch, search) and I anticipate working on the rest over the next month.

Generally speaking, there are four components to the update:

1st - Replace the code that creates the tree drop-down list with one for branches.

2nd - Update the treestr variable to include branch, since this is what gets passed to the page that will display the result.

3rd - Modify $query to include a table that contains the branch field (person or branchlink) and update the where string so that the results are limited to the branch selected.

4th – Also modify $query to include the branch.description field, insert into the result table a column for the branch in both the first row, which contains the headers, and the subsequent rows.

I've determined that there are certain screens that won't include the ability to search by Branch since the underlying data can't be easily linked to the person or branchlink tables. An example of that is Places. So what I've done for that is to leave most of the place pages as is and only include Branch search when you get down to the placesearch page, since it does include person data. I plan on using the same approach for similar pages.

When I'm done, I'll go through and identify all of the changes that I made, which I will be happy to share. But I have to warn you, in the real world I am a software developer working on enterprise-wide, mission critical applications. So my solutions can appear a little abstract. Add to that my relative inexperience in php and it might take a much more experienced user to translate what I have done into something usable for the masses.

[rocksea]

mary theresa, thank you for looking into it and sharing your info.

ya maybe once you post it, somebody else may also join and make it working for all. cheers,,