Request Report on Individuals: Help
This page permits you to search the database for individuals matching
specified conditions, and present them in a basic report
as described by the
report results page.
At present there are only minimal options for modifying the appearance of
this report.
There is a selection list which lists all of the fields that can be
displayed in the resulting report. Each time you use the mouse to click
on an item in this list, the item is moved from this list to the list of
chosen fields below it. The contents of the fields will be displayed in
the order you chose them. There is currently no method to change the order of
the fields once you have chosen them, except to refresh the page and start over again.
There is a selection list which permits you to specify the fields to be
used to sort the resulting report. Each time you use the mouse to click
on an item in this list, the item is moved from this list to the list of
chosen fields below it. The fields will be used to sort the report in
the order you chose them. There is currently no method to change the order of
the fields once you have chosen them, except to refresh the page and start over again.
There are only a few fields that you can use to select the
records to be included in the report.
- For most fields if the specified text appears anywhere in the value
of the field, then the record is included. For example specifying
a Surname of 'Smith' will include any individuals whose surnames
include the text 'smith'. It will match against
"Smithson" and "Sexsmith". The supplied value is
actually interpreted as a
regular expression.
The pattern "Sm[aeiouy]th" matches any string that contains "sm"
followed by any vowel followed by the characters "th". For example
it will match "Smythe" and "Smothers".
If you want an exact match to the field, for example only surnames
that are equal to "Smith" then you must start the pattern with
a caret "^" and end it with a dollar sign "$", for example "^Smith$"
will match values that are equal to "Smith" and nothing else.
If you do not
supply any text then the field is not used for selection.
- The above consideration applies to locations particularly. Since
a location is represented internally as the numeric key of a
location record when you specify a pattern to search for that is
expanded to a check for every location record key that matches the
supplied pattern. This may be hundreds, or even thousands, of values
if you look for a string that is part of a very large number of
location values, for example a county name. The pattern "Middlesex",
for example, currently matches against 7,685 location records, only
12 of which are not Middlesex county in Ontario.
So when identifying a
location be as specific as possible. In particular if you expect
the specified string to match at the beginning of the location
text make sure you include the caret "^" that constrains the
pattern to only match at the beginning of the location text.
- For date fields only the year portion of the date is used to
select records. Any additional information, such as a month,
is ignored.
- For fields whose value is given as a list of specific values, if
a selection is not made, then the field is not used for selection,
otherwise only individuals who match the specified value are
included. An example is Gender.
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