Migrating data from Title field to Occupation event using Gramps?

Question

When I started using Gramps (older versions 3 & 4) for my family tree, I chose to use the Title field to store their occupation information. Gramps since version 5 offers the capability to print the last occupation event in the relationship graph so I decided to migrate my existing data to a proper occupation event. As I have 900+ persons in my family tree, I would like to automate the process. Here is how I plan to do things:

1. query the persons database to get the title field data as well as the person id
2. process this data to a nice input file (I need to reformat the title information as sometimes I recorded several jobs at once)
3. create occupation events from my input file

I am familiar with python and programming in general but I don't know how to interact with Gramps files. Are there example code or documentation I could use to understand how data is organised?

Better ideas accepted.

EDIT Note : I am currently using v5.0.1

After some research, I know how to do the step 1 above: by using the export menu I can generate a csv where I can find the title and the person id straigth-away. Step 2 is just me cleaning the data so that's ok. However for step 3, I am stuck. It looks like I could use the import feature if I was able to generate an xml file in the same format as Gramps. The problem is that Gramps expects something like this:

<person handle="_cd284dd52627d55ab80" change="1554508105" id="I0010">
  ...
  <eventref hlink="_e235f0096da3481aebdc5bf0138" role="Primary"/>
  ...
</person>
<event handle="_e235f0096da3481aebdc5bf0138" change="1554508051" id="E1346">
  <type>Occupation</type>
  <dateval val="1892"/>
  <description>Teacher</description>
</event>

And I have no clue on how to generate the handle, change and hlink values so that they don't break Gramps database. I also don't know what happens if I import partial information, does it break the other data?

Answer 1

You could find examples of GRAMP xml files here : https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps/blob/maintenance/gramps50/example/gramps/example.gramps

For details about handle, hlink, etc. They have a great wiki. In particular, for the handle (time+random number used to identify event), you can look here: https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Using_database_API#Handles

P.S.: In particular, I would start looking here https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Using_database_API