Two Types of Problems - Sun, 11 Nov 2007

The last thing to do before I issue the next release is to eliminate the log file and move the messages that were reported in the log file into the File Information section of the Everything Report.

In doing so, I am revisiting all the error and warning messages that Behold produced. I’m rewriting them and making their text customizable (so different languages can be supported) and making them selectable (so they can be turned off if you don’t want them).

I see that I can classify them into two types: Possible GEDCOM problems and possible data errors.

GEDCOM standards have changed over time, and every program outputs its data into GEDCOM in slightly different forms, often not conforming to the latest GEDCOM standard. I’ve made Behold to be very forgiving so that it reads everything possible. But when Behold reads files that may be GEDCOM but seem to have something wrong with them, Behold will report these to let you know. Maybe the file was truncated or maybe the character set was wrong. But Behold will still read as much data as possible from the file and try to continue processing. Often you can just ignore these GEDCOM errors knowing that Behold will read everything it can.

But you will want to look at the problems reported as possible data errors. These will tell you where you might need to fix your data. For example, there might be duplicate IDs, multiple husbands, missing links or undefined sources. To fix these, you’ll need to go into your genealogy program that created the GEDCOM and update your data. When version 2 of Behold is out, you’ll be able to fix your data right in Behold.

The messages up to now were are real hodge-podge. I added them as I developed. They are inconsistent in form and style. So I am now turning each into one of the two types: GEDCOM problems and data problems, improving their default text and getting them to work in a consistent way. There are over 50 of these messages, and I’m going through them one by one. This should take a couple of days and then the new release will be out.