Gedcom Census error handling (bravo)

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 11 Dec 2007 00:35

Hello, Nick --

Just wanted to mention that today I had what a programmer might call an 'unexpected conditon'. While entering a family's census record, there was a lodger in the household for which there was no information at all aside from his name and gender. Thus I had no age or birthplace information.

However, we know what happens when you try to do something and leave out the age. Gedcom Census comes back and reminds us that we must enter the age. There is no way to tell it that the bleeping census taker left the form blank.

So I entered '0' to see what would happen. From there I was impressed to see that it calculated the birth year as '1910' (the census I was working on) and asked me if I wanted it to create a birth event as usual. I let it go on and create the event, then deleted the birth event from FH, but saying 'no' to the birth event creation would have worked just as well.

I don't know if you planned for this particular scenario, but I was quite pleased that my work-around of entering 0 was successful.

Thanks again for a fabulous program.

Jan

ID:2651

Post by **NickWalker** » 11 Dec 2007 11:13

I think on balance it is such a rare occurrence that I'll leave it as it is rather than build in options to not enter the age. Your solution is a reasonable work around or you could manually create the census record yourself in FH.

Thanks for the kind words

Nick

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 12 Dec 2007 05:18

I am quite happy with the way things work now -- and I can see that it would be an insane amount of work to change the program to deal with that situation, which is rare.

I posted about it because I was amused at myself, sitting there like a dolt thinking 'now what do I do?' when clearly, I could have put in any value, as long as I said 'no' to the birth event creation, or deleted the data afterwards. But that solution didn't occur to me at first. [oops]

It was pleasing, however, to find that the program did behave nicely when given a value of '0' because someone could easily enter it as a typo for 10, 20, etc. -- or find it as an entry on a census form.

Jan

Family Historian User Group