JSGED Browser

(c)2006 Herb Hasler

The JSGED Browser actually consists of two separate components.

GEDTOJS - Converts a GED file to javascript variable definitions
JSGED Browser - Allows browsing of the converted data

The browser is written in javascript and html. You can download both parts here

Installation and Instructions

Unzipping the package you will notice three html files.

BrowseGED.html
BrowseGEDHelp.html
GEDtoJS.html

You will also see a directory labeled as JSGED. This directory contains all the images and supporting files used by JSGED. The html files and this directory should be put in the root of your html docs directory (within the three html files, images and other files are referenced as JSGED/(filename)). If you want to put this directory elsewhere within your document structure, you will need to update the html files accordingly.

The first step in using the system is to convert your GED file by following these steps.

Open GEDtoJS.html within your browser.
Open your GED file within a text editor (ex: notepad)
Within the text editor select all text (CTRL-A) and copy it (CTRL-C) to the clipboard
Paste the copied text (CTRL-V) into the top text box of the GEDtoJS window
Click on the convert button
The converted text appears in the bottom text box. Click within the bottom box and select all text (CTRL-A) and then copy the text to the clipboard (CTRL-C)
Open a new text editor window and paste the selected text into it (CTRL-V)
Save the text as the file JSGED/Ged.js

Within the Ged.js file you should now find the person you want displayed when the GED browser first opens. All the individuals within this file begin with 'indiv[#]=' Once you find the person you want displayed, note the number of the individual.

Now within the file BrowseGED.html, you will see the following two lines near the beginning.

   showInd(1, 3);
   currInd = 1;

Now, you should change the '1' within this file to be the '#' you located above. The number 3 represents the family number to be displayed. If this person was only married once, you can use the value -1. But if this person has been married more than once, you can specify exactly which family you want to be shown first by replacing the 3 with the family number (which you can find in a similar way to the individual number by looking for the lines that start with 'families[#]' in the Ged.js file.

You are now ready to browse the data. Open the BrowseGED.html and you will be able to view and browse the information. For help on using the browser, please click here

Masking data for living individuals

The systems determines if a person is living if they were born after a specific year and they have no death date. The default year is 1900. This can be configured by updating the following line within BrowseGED.html to the year you wish to use.

   LIVING_YEAR=1900;

For living individuals there are four levels which determine which data will be displayed. These levels are set by updating the value of the following line to either 0, 1, 2 or 3.

   security=1;

The following lists all values of this variable and their meaning.

Security Value	Meaning
0	All birth data is shown
1	Month and day of birth and christening is masked (Year and place is shown)
2	Month and day of birth and christening is masked. Place of birth or christening is not shown. (Only Year is shown)
3	Entire birth and christening date not shown. Place of birth or christening is not shown. (No information shown)

Miscellaneous Notes

This program assumes that all dates will be in the format dd MON yyyy (ex: 03 JAN 1972). This is important with regards to statistical reports and determining living individuals. You should make sure that when you export your data to GED format, the dates are exported this way.
Keep in mind that this is javascript, which means it runs entirely within the user's browser. This makes navigation much quicker, but it limits the size of the data. Currently GEDtoJS expects no more that 2048 individuals and 1024 families. You can edit the GEDtoJS.html and up this limit but the larger the dataset the longer it will take the initial page to display (because it downloads all the data to the user's browser). I've never tested this with a GED file that has more than 750 individuals.
With a large set of data, some of the reports can take more than ten seconds to run. This may cause a message in the user's browser that a script is causing the browser to run slow.
Even though you can use the security settings mentioned above to mask some of the data, savvy users would be able to see and download the GED.js file unless you disable right clicking on the BrowseGED.html page. You can learn how to add this extra security to your page here or many other places on the web through the various search engines.
This system is limited to being able to displaying the first two marriages and first twelve children.
I've noticed that PAF, when exporting a GED file, sometimes will add some unprintable characters to the first line of the file. Simply remove these characters before converting the file.
Since PAF is the only system I use, I've only tested this will GED files created by PAF5.0
Note: because all the name data is in javascript it will not be indexed as part of the BrowseGED.html page and show up as part a web search (if your pages are submitted to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc).

If you want more details or have any comments, feel free to drop me an e-mail.

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