Question+with+respect+to+Changing+a+Master+Source+to+a+Different+Source+Template

I probably should post this more as a question than as a new wiki page, but here goes anyway.

I'm continuing apace with my project to convert all my sources into extremely split sources. As such, I ran into an interesting situation.

I now have several dozen obituaries that have been entered as extremely split sources. All of the extremely split obituary sources are using the built-in Free Form source template. When I need to make a new obituary source, I simply copy an existing obituary source and edit it a bit to reflect the new obituary source.I then memorize and paste the citation for the new obituary source in lots of appropriate places because an obituary typically mentions a fairly large number of people.

I'm very pleased with results. In particular, if I need to change something in an extremely split obituary source then the change is automatically applied to all its citations without having to chase down each of the citations. However, I have found myself wanting to make minor tweaks to each of my several dozen extremely split obituary footnote sentences. This is still a manual operation, and will only get worse as I add more obituary sources to my collection of extremely split sources. So I'm beginning to wish that I had created a source template for my extremely split sources. My source template would store all the data in the Master Source itself and nothing in the Source Details. With this convention in place, I could still make any needed changes just once for the Master Source and all the changes would immediately be applied to all the citations, and GEDCOM export would be compatible with third party software. But more importantly, by using a source template I could make certain minor tweaks just once to the source template, and the tweaks would be applied immediately (I think!) to all the extremely split Master Sources.

That raises two questions:


 * 1) Is it really true that if I had started out using my own custom source template instead of the built-in Free Form one that tweaks to the template would be applied immediately to all the Master Sources using the source template? 
 * 2) Is there any straightforward way to convert my Free Form Master Sources for obituaries to templated Master Sources and thereby to avoid having to redo all my citations? 

Thanks, Jerry

Added 12/15/2013

I think I've managed to figure out a solution that I'm happy with, and as always Tom's comments were very helpful. I didn't really explain very well in my initial post but my ambitions are actually much more modest than creating a fully automated solution that will convert the source templates for all my extremely split obituary sources all in one go. I'm willing to convert them manually and one at a time. If I had thousands of them at this time, I might think differently, but I have exactly thirty-two of them to convert and that's really not so bad to do manually. What I'm not willing to do manually is for each of my thirty-two extremely split obituary sources to create a new Master Source with a different source template because then for each of the thirty-two I would have to go through and do the memorize and paste thing for each of the many, many citations. So my goal is not to have to redo all the citations, which is really the issue which got me into extreme splitting of sources in the first place. So here's the process.


 * 1) Get the new source template as "just right" as possible. I'm not so worried about the exact format of the footnote, short footnote, and bibliography sentences as I am being sure that the template collects the correct data elements. The sentence structure can be easily tweaked. The data elements are not so easy to tweak. This will be my first user defined source template, so it will have TemplateID = 10000. But whatever the TemplateID of my new template is, make note of it.
 * 2) From within RM, go to the existing source and make a temporary copy of the existing footnote, short footnote, and bibliography sentences - for example, in Notepad. I don't even need to save the temporary copy in a file, just in the Notepad window. The reason for making the copy is that step #4 is going to have the effect of destroying the existing footnote, short footnote, and bibliography sentences.
 * 3) Make note of the SourceID for the Master Source for which I'm about the change the template. This is actually much easier than doing a WHERE clause based on the name of the Master Source or anything like that.
 * 4) Execute the following SQL: UPDATE SourceTable SET TemplateID = 10000 WHERE SourceID = 1403; (or whatever - the 10000 is the TemplateID from step #1 and the 1403 is the SourceID from step #3).
 * 5) From within RM, edit the Master Source in question. Copy and paste the appropriate data elements I have saved in the Notepad window into the appropriate places in the Master Source. This is really easy to do manually, but would be hard to program in a fully automated fashion.
 * 6) Repeat steps #2 through #5 for each of the extremely split obituary sources.
 * 7) Celebrate. No citations are impacted by this process, so I'm done.

Jerry

Some relevant pages: Source Template, A BETTER Free Form Sources - Adventures in Extreme Splitting