search

frizbog / gedcom4j

Java library for reading/writing genealogy files in GEDCOM format
http://gedcom4j.org
54 stars 36 forks source link

Allow caller to specify tags to be ignored during parse operation #124

Open frizbog opened 8 years ago

frizbog commented 8 years ago

The Parser could be pre-loaded with a set of tags to be ignored prior to parsing. For example, if you know that when you parse a file you won't be looking at any of the multimedia records, you could specify that OBJE records (along with all their children) are to be ignored. The parser would then skip right over these records without loading them into the object model.

frizbog commented 8 years ago

This could be problematic if unignored tags have pointers/references to the XREFs of things that are ignored. One solution would be to never ignore anything that has an XREF on it...but that would really take away a lot of the intended benefit of this item.

frizbog commented 7 years ago

Thinking more about my comment of Aug 18...if you've said you don't care about a type of tag, it follows that you don't care about references to it. As long as the file continues to load ok, I am not sure this would really be an issue.

frizbog commented 7 years ago

What would be an issue would be context. Some tags have multiple meanings, and those meanings derive from their context. Further, you might reasonably want some control to say things like "I don't care about source citations for individual events, but I do for family events" or "I don't care about multimedia objects for anything except individuals."