gPrime Demonstration

There is now a gPrime demo available here:

http://demo.gprime.info/

Username: demo
Password: demo

This is an alpha-alpha-alpha version, and so there are many things that don’t work yet. However, there are a few things that do work—at least a little bit.

First, a few points to make you familiar with the demo:

1. All views are shown a page at a time. The page views for each primary object (Person, Family, etc) shows what page you are on, how many pages total, how many items are showing, how many are matching, and the total. For example, if you click here (and log in):

http://demo.gprime.info/person?search=Alvarado

then you will see “Showing 25/26 of 2157”. That means that there are 26 Alavarado’s, 25 showing on this page, out of 2157 total person records. Click on a row to see the details of that row. Click on “>” to go to next page, “<” previous page, “>>” to last page, and “<<” to first page.

2. Much of the data in the “example.gramps” data file can now be seen… few items can be edited. First goal is to make everything visible.

3. If there is an error, the system just says “There has been an error. Please check the input and try again.” We’ll have fewer errors, and better messages soon.

4. One of the most interesting working proof-of-concepts is the search mechanism. You can read about it a little here:

https://github.com/GenealogyCollective/gprime/blob/master/docs/Search.md#search

It works in two ways:

a. just type what you want to match, and it will search the default fields for that view in a loose fashion: case insensitive, partial matches.

b. you can search specifically: say exactly what field, and what exactly.

If you enter “Alv“, it will look for that value in a few fields (surname, given, etc). If (in person) you type “surname=Alv%” or “given=Alv%” then it will search for those fields starting with Ala (the percent character is a wildcard, matching anything).

You can search for items that are a bit deep in the object’s structure. To do this you may need to consult the gPrime Schema:

http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/GenealogyCollective/gprime/blob/master/docs/Schema.html

For example, to find all of the events (on the events view) from 1987:

date.dateval.2 = 1987

You can also search on joined objects: for example, you can find all the people (on the person view) who have a Death event:

event_ref_list.ref.type.string = Death

This might take a little longer to report the search results, but many searches are possible.

5. Finally, you can combine search with a selection. On the person view, if you say:

select given, surname

select gid, event_ref_list.ref.type.string

You’ll see just the columns you want. You can combine that with a WHERE clause:

select gid, event_ref_list.ref.type.string where event_ref_list.ref.type.string = Death

This selection language is not as easy as it could be yet. But, it should be fairly complete. That is, you should be able to search for any matching criteria that you can think of. (Searching for non-matching values needs some work.)

This is not SQL. This is a special language developed for gPrime that is used throughout the gPrime code to make it easy to program, but fast. gPrime will suport Gramps-style filters too, but for many searches this method may be more efficient.

6. Reports (listed under Actions) can be run, but you can’t see the output yet.

7. The demo password can’t be changed. But you can change the look of the gPrime web interface and the language, under Settings.

8. Multiple users can be working simultaneously.

Please feel free to give it a try and report back what you think. Thanks!