family-tree-maker

What is it?

Make a png file of a family tree from excel sheet/google form. familytreemaker by adrienverge generates the required ouput, and takes in a .txt file in a specific format. For someone wishing to make a family tree, a more convenient method might be to send out a short Google Form, and have the text file be created automatically, in the required format, and syntax.

Requirements:

1. familytreemaker by adrienverge
2. Excel sheet of given format - (Timestamp, Name, Father's name, Mother's name, Partner's name, Sex). A google form with all of these formats as questions will atomatically create this sheet.

How to use:

1. Move the maketreemaker.py file from the above source into this repo's folder.
2. Move the excel file into the rep's folder, name it "Family_Tree_Responses.xlsx".
3. Run

./png_maker.py

./png_maker.py makes a call to familytreemaker by adrienverge. Hence, it is important that, Adrien's familytreemaker.py is in the repo's folder. Only that single file from the dependency is required for this program to run.

If it does not work, try running chmod +x <filename.py>.

This repo also includes a menu.py file, this gives lookup features for the people in the excel sheet. These include:

1. Searching for members by Name
2. Getting relative's information (mother, father, children, spouse)

IMPORTANT:

1. The file requires a connected tree without any disconnected elements. If a disconnected tree is present, multiple .png files will be created for each connected subtree.

2. This does not supported cyclic connections. This only happens when siblings have children, or a person is a child of themselves. Adrien Verge kindly lets us know that something is, Seriously wrong. This can happen due to a mistake during data input. Hence, recheck the excel sheet if this error is thrown.

How does it work?

Excel Sheet is read and converted to a JSON file. (This JSON file is handy to have and can be used for other projects as well) JSON file is read, and Member data structures are created for each entry. Each Member has attributes as each column of the excel sheet. Member is wrapped by a Node data structure. This has a data attribute which is a pointer to its respective the Member class. Node has other attributes like mother, father, and spouse, which are references to Member objects, and children which is an array of references to Member objects.

A "Tree" is then created by adding references to each Node's attributes. This tree may be a disconnected tree, as there might be people who do not have entries, which leaves empty spots in a family tree. The missing responses that would complete the tree will then need to be added in manually

Structure can be seen by this picture, made by using ./png_maker.py (ignore the spouse nodes).

This example also does an excellent job of displaying some of the limitations of making the image. For familytreemaker by adrienverge to work, and therefore, for png_maker.py to work, people without a spouse cannot have children. A spouse is always required. However if running menu.py with the same information, this is allowed. menu.py allows for people to have children without having a spouse, and for children to have a single parent.

Therefore in the case of a single parent, they will cause issues in making of the png, but will be available for lookup. I recommend adding in a dummy spouse entry in the excel sheet, and assign it as the other parent. This won't affect the working of menu.py, and will allow png_maker.py to run as well.