Creating a Custom Report

This tutorial describes a report that will read data in your file and calculate the average age at which males and females were married and the average age of fathers and mothers when their children were born. These calculations can help you calculate the average age per generation among your ancestors or descendants. The output can appear in a built-in GEDitCOM II report or can be directed to another application, such as Microsoft Word. When you are done with this tutorial, you should be able to create your own custom reports by changing the type of data collected and the format of the output report.

The best way to learn programming is to see it and action and view it in the programming development environment. To provide this approach, the tutorial is provided as follows:

Download the "Create Report Tutorial" by clicking here
Double click to expand the download (if needed) to get the GEDitCOM II extension named CreateReportTutorial.gplug.
In GEDitCOM II, use the menu command Extensions→Install Extensions... and use the dialog box to select the downloaded CreateReportTutorial.gplug. The "Create Report Tutorial" will appear in the Extensions→Report submenu and can be run by chosing that new menu item.
The best way to work through this tutorial is to open CreateReportTutorial.gplug in GEDitCOM Editor. The simplest process is to choose "Create Report Tutorial" from the Extensions→Report submenu while holding down the option key. The Extension will open in GEDitCOM Editor

Once CreateReportTutorial.gplug in opened in GEDitCOM Editor, you can work through the tutorial with the following actions:

In GEDitCOM Editor, expand the "Documentation" section and click on "help.html". Next, choose the Template→Preview in Browser... menu command. The tutorial will open in your default browser. Follow that tutorial.
To see the source code for Internal Script or Python versions of this tutorial, expand the "Scripts" section and click on "Generation Ages IS.gcscpt" or "Generation Ages Python.py," respectively.
To see the source for the AppleScript version of this tutorial, expand the "Properties" section, click on "other files" and then double click on "Generation Ages to Report.applescript" or "Generation Ages to MS Word.applescript" to open in Apple's Script Editor.
To see typical settings for a GEDitCOM II extension, expand the "Properties" section, click on manifest, menu choices, or menu choices SD. The GEDitCOM Editor gives details on setting these extension properties.

Besides being a tutorial and creating an extension for a custom report, the downloaded extension can be a template to write your own custom report extension. The process would be to copy and rename the downloaded extension, open it in GEDitCOM Editor, and start changing it to create a new report.