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Archiver > TMG > 2002-12 > 1041376978


From: Terry Reigel <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] 5.04 Principal v. Role
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 18:23:18 -0500
References: <000201c2b071$add25170$6eb52244@khnlic0umhcfd>


Linda Gaylord-Kuhn wrote:

> Anyway, I noticed that when P1 is toggled from "Principal" to some
>other role, P2 often changes as well (and not necessarily to something I
>would want).
>

Yes, I find this very annoying, but some people like it so I guess it's
going to stay.

>>Often it doesn't matter, and in such cases I generally use the [P] and
>>[W] variables, so I don't have to type the longer one. However,
>>sometimes it does matter. If you want to refer to one specific Principal
>>
>>
>>by Role without regard for the position in the tag,
>>
>>
>
>You lost me, Terry, on the "without regard for the position in the tag"
>part.
>

What I was talking about is a case where you have two people in a tag,
and you need to keep the relationship between them straight. Say you
want to create a Namesake Tag Type to record when someone is named after
an ancestor, and you want the tag to generate "Jimmy Jones was named for
James Jones Sr." Obviously, you can't do this with your basic "[P] was
named for [PO]" because it would be backwards when the ancestor was the
subject. You could do it with "[P1] was named for [P2]" -- but if you
did you would have to be careful about always entering the child in P1
and ancestor in P2 (that's what I meant by "position.") Or you could do
it with Roles using something like "[R:Child] was named for
[R:Ancestor]" and then it doesn't matter which person goes in which
slot, so long as you apply the correct Roles. Buyers and sellers in real
estate would be another example.

>And that brings up another question associated with multiple marriages.
>Let's play the game, "What's My Birth Order?" I'm my mother's firstborn
>and my father's secondborn. I've been trying to figure out a slick way
>to incorporate birth order into the birth roles, but scenarios like this
>make it impossible to do. Right?
>

For practical purposes, I'd think it's impractical to have roles take
care of this automatically -- you'd have to have roles for all the
combinations -- mother's 1st & father's 2nd; mother's 1st & father's
3rd; mother's 2nd & father's 1st, etc., etc. My suggestion would be to
create roles for the common ones, and then edit the individual tags when
you run into something uncommon.

Terry


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