Notes on Upgrading to Version 7

This page is for Family Historian users who are upgrading to version 7 from an earlier version.

Important Notes - Please read

Important Notes on Restoring Property Box Customizations

If you previously customized the Property Box, when you first look at Family Historian 7, your customizations will appear to have gone.  In fact they haven't gone.  They have just been temporarily suspended, and you can restore them.  They were suspended because version 7 introduces new features - such as greater control over field layout - which you may wish to make use of yourself; and also because some internal data storage changes may not be 100% compatible with previous customizations in all cases.  Consequently, if you do wish to restore your customizations, we recommend that you first look carefully at how some Property Box tabs now look, and decide if there are aspects of these that you wish to retain (such as Note fields that can now extend over a specified number of rows).  We also recommend that after restoration, you carefully check each restored Property Box tab, to make sure that it is working as expected.

There are also some important special issues that apply specifically to Property Box tabs for Source records:

  1. Property Box customizations for Source records are  shared with the new Citation Window.  So if you restore your Source record customizations, you will also be making changes to the Citation Window, which we strongly recommend that you don't do unless and until you have worked out how it works and how therefore you want to use it. 
  2. Source records, unlike all other record types, now have two 'Main' tabs: one for generic Source records and one for templated Source records (see Upgrade Issues with Sources below).  If you restore your custom Source record tabs you will lose all settings for the second of these tabs. 
  3. You can now configure not just Source record fields, but also source citation fields.  These citation fields are ignored when a Source record is displayed in the Property Box, but they are used when a source citation is displayed in the Citation Window.  If you simply restore all your old Source record customizations you will lose all of these, which you do not want to do.
  4. The Main tab for templated Source records ("Main (template)") uses a special new item type "<Template Fields>" which will be missing from your legacy tabs.

In practice this means that although you may wish to retain some aspects of the way you customized the Property Box for Source records in the past, you are not advised to simply restore them and leave it at that.

How to Restore Property Box Customizations

To restore old settings, open the Property Box, click on the menu button on the Property Box toolbar, and select Customize Property Box from the menu that appears.  This opens the Customize Property Box window.  For each record type, click on the Old Versions button at the bottom. This will show a menu with all the old versions of the settings for this record type, that you can restore.  The menu will be empty if there aren't any (if, for example, the current version has not changed).  Restoring an old version is not the same as importing an exported tab.  When you export a tab, you will only export that tab.  When you restore settings, for a given record type, you will restore all tabs that were previously customized for that record type - which is to say, the Main tab, and any new custom tabs that you previously created.  You can revert to the default settings for the record type, at any time, by clicking the Restore Defaults button.

Despite the remarks about Source record settings above, you may want to restore your Source record Property Box customizations, at least temporarily, so that you can remind yourself about how they worked, in case you want to reproduce some aspects of the way they worked in version 6 or earlier.  Having restored the old settings and made a note of how they worked, you can then revert to the version 7 defaults by clicking on the Restore Defaults button.

Notes on Plugins

Family Historian has upgraded the technology it uses to run plugins.  The new technology is not 100% backwardly-compatible with the old.  This means that a plugin that worked with version 6, may not work correctly with version 7 - or not until it too has been upgraded to make it fully compatible.  If you previously downloaded and installed any plugins, these will be initially marked as disabled in the Plugins Dialog.  If you originally downloaded the plugin from the Plugin Store, we recommend that you check the Plugin Store for an updated version that is version 7 compatible, and download and install that.  

Advice for Plugin Authors

If you are a plugin author, we recommend that you test your plugins using the Family Historian sample project before using them with real project data.  To re-enable a disabled plugin (which you will need to do before you can run it), just select it in the list in the Plugins Dialog and click the Edit button.  You will be given the opportunity to re-enable it.

There is advice on how to update plugins to make them compatible with the new technology, in the Plugin Help. To access Plugin Help, click on the How to Write Plugins button in the Plugins Dialog.  The relevant section is Converting Lua 5.1 plugins to Lua 5.3.  A good source of advice on writing and working with plugins is the Family Historian User Group website.  If you have questions, consider posting them there.

Notes on Queries

If you previously created or imported any custom queries, it is possible, though unlikely, that these could be affected by some of the data storage changes in version 7, and could, as a result, contain invalid row filters or invalid column specifications.  If that happens, the relevant row filters or column specifications will be automatically disabled, and a message will be displayed when you run any such query, that says: "This query contains one or more disabled columns or row filters.  Continue anyway?".  If you look on the Rows or Columns tabs, you should be able to spot the disabled lines quite easily, in the row filter or column listings, as the text will be greyed, to show that these lines are disabled.  In each case, you can either correct the errors and press the Update button, to update and re-enable the line.  Or you can delete the erroneous line.  If you previously marked the query as 'Read Only' (by ticking 'Read Only' on the General tab), you will need to untick that option before you can make changes to the query.

This issue does not affect standard queries.  It only affects custom queries.

Upgrade Issues with Sources

Family Historian 7 contains important new features and tools relating to sources.  You will see references to these new features and new terms like source templates and generic sources.  It may seem intimidating and a lot to take in.  The important thing to appreciate is that you do not need to change the way you work with sources unless or until you decide that you want to - and that may be never.

A generic Source record is just any Source record that is not linked to a source template.  Prior to version 7, Family Historian did not support source templates.  So if you have just upgraded to version 7, all of your existing Source records will be generic Source records.  And if you want to continue working as you did before, when offered the choice, you just need to remember, when creating a Source record, to always take the option Add New Generic Source, rather than Add New Source from Template. 

What if you don't want to continue working as you did before?  You may be wondering: should you start using templated Source records as well as, or instead of, generic Source records?  There is no problem about using a mixture of generic and templated Source records.  You can certainly do that.  But you may, quite understandably, feel that you want to have a single consistent way of doing things.  If you were a new user looking for advice on how to manage sources, our advice in general would be to use templated sources in preference to generic sources, from the start, and specifically to use source templates from the Essentials collection.  But you're not a new user.   You may have a great many existing Source records.  So what should you do?

Our advice is not to rush into a decision on this. Take your time. If you're unsure about what to do, we recommend that you continue using generic Source records at least for now.  If you decide to change your ways of doing things, you can do this whenever you want. There is no particular advantage in taking action immediately.  If you're thinking of changing the way you work, give yourself as long as you need to familiarize yourself with the issues.  Talk to other Family Historian users and find out what they're doing.  The Family Historian User Group website is an ideal place for this kind of conversation.

If you're thinking of using source templates, why not try them out and do some experimenting with them in the Family Historian sample project? It's always a good idea to learn by trying things out in the sample project.  If you make mistakes, it doesn't matter because it's not real data.  You can even reset the sample project at any time if you want to.

You may at some point decide that you would like to convert some or all of your existing generic Source records to be templated Source records.  But converting generic Source records to templated Source records is not a trivial thing to do.  Over time we expect tools to emerge (such as plugins in the Plugin Store) to help automate some aspects of the conversion.  However, it is not possible to design a fully automated conversion tool that will work for everyone, because every user uses generic Source records a little bit differently, and consequently the requirements of converting them vary from person to person.

If you would like advice and suggestions on converting existing generic Source records to templated Source records, we again recommend you post questions on the Family Historian User Group website.

To learn more, please see Sources and Source Templates.

Ancestral Sources 7

If you use Ancestral Sources (companion program for Family Historian), please be sure to upgrade to Ancestral Sources version 7. The new version has been enhanced to take advantage of Family Historian's new features. Also, earlier versions of Ancestral Sources may not work correctly with version 7 of Family Historian.