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Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog » Blog Entry           prev Prev   Next next

Behold Version 1.0.4.3 - Mon, 1 Apr 2013

Well I snuck a new version in, and no, it’s not an April fools joke.

It includes one small fix for a particular type of date that rarely occurs but two people have now encountered it. It’s bad because it causes Behold to be unable to read the GEDCOM file and gives an Access Violation and crashes.

The type of GEDCOM date that causes the problem is:

2 DATE INT 1861 ()

That is an interpreted date and the parenthesis is supposed to contain the text that is interpreted. In this particular case, there is no text, and when I check in Behold what is in the first character, it gives the Access Violation because it is looking in memory that is a no-no.

Unfortunately, the way Delphi (my programming language) handles this is with an exception to the program which crashes it. I can turn these access violation checks off, but it’s not a good idea because it indicates that something is being done wrong and needs to be fixed. I can turn it off in the release versions, but then the program may crash anyway but without being able to tell what the cause was.

Behold has very few of these type of crashes left in it. This was a rarely used date construct that was not output correctly (by RootsMagic in this case because GEDCOM requires at least 1 character between the parenthesis) and I hadn’t encountered it before in my testing.

The solution is easy for me. Before I check what is in the first character, I simply need to ensure that there is at least 1 character. It’s a fairly trivial fix and this is one bit of code where I had just missed making that fix. But now it’s done.

The reason why it’s version 1.0.4.3 was because I earlier had privately released version 1.0.4.1 (which improved sorting of Unicode fonts) and 1.0.4.2 which had this bug fix. 1.0.4.3 removed a bit of the sorting code that was doubling the time Behold was taking to load.

This 1.0.4.3 version is not a required download. You probably won’t notice anything whether you have it or don’t have it.

What I’m really working on and still promise to get to you as soon as possible, is version 1.1. The Life Events are coming together. That along with the ages and sorting of events and consistency checking, will make this a very important release.

Hopefully by the end of April (and I hope that’s not an April fool’s joke either).

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