glitch when attaching records in familysearch

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evansdruemadison1
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Joined: Thu Mar 23, 2017 3:43 pm

glitch when attaching records in familysearch

#1

Post by evansdruemadison1 »

When you try to attach a record in Familysearch to a person or family in FamilyTree, sometimes you have to type the PID number into the little box to get the correct name to appear. If you copy and paste it and hit "enter", you get an error message. However, if you copy, paste and hit "backspace" before hitting "enter" the correct name appears and you can attach with no problem. I wrote the help line at familysearch and they told me to empty the cache, which helped nothing, of course. A friend who writes software told me it sounded like the search criteria was set to "EQUALS" and should be set to "CONTAINS". He seemed to think that would solve the problem. If anyone is reading this and has a way to check it out. I would appreciate it.
russellhltn
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Re: glitch when attaching records in familysearch

#2

Post by russellhltn »

I've not done it in awhile, but it sounds like your "cut" is containing a stray space at the end. "Contains" is too costly in terms of search time, but if I'm right, a applying a "trim" function to the input field would fix it.
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aebrown
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Re: glitch when attaching records in familysearch

#3

Post by aebrown »

evansdruemadison1 wrote:When you try to attach a record in Familysearch to a person or family in FamilyTree, sometimes you have to type the PID number into the little box to get the correct name to appear. If you copy and paste it and hit "enter", you get an error message. However, if you copy, paste and hit "backspace" before hitting "enter" the correct name appears and you can attach with no problem.
I can't duplicate this problem. I've tried adding extra spaces at the end of the PID, and pressing Enter works just fine. So as near as I can tell, extra spaces at the end of the entered PID in the source linker are trimmed as they should be.

I suppose it's possible that your copy is including a stray character at the end that is NOT any kind of whitespace, so the trimming function doesn't remove it. We could determine if that's happening if you would paste such a problematic clipboard into a post here on the forum, preferably between quotation marks, e.g.,

Code: Select all

My PID is "L6M7-MXK~"
where the "~" might represent the extra character.

It's also conceivable that your browser is a factor. I was using Chrome for my testing.
evansdruemadison1 wrote:I wrote the help line at familysearch and they told me to empty the cache, which helped nothing, of course.
You're right -- that was pointless advice for this issue.
evansdruemadison1 wrote:A friend who writes software told me it sounded like the search criteria was set to "EQUALS" and should be set to "CONTAINS". He seemed to think that would solve the problem.
Your friend is unfortunately completely wrong with this suggestion. Only an exact match (with appropriate trimming of the input) is correct. If the software used the equivalent of "CONTAINS", then entering a PID of "L6M7-MXK" would match "L6M7-MXK2" or "L6M7-MXK3", etc. (or if he's imagining that the CONTAINS would go the opposite direction, just reverse the scenario and it's still a problem). Some people mistakenly assume that PIDs in FamilySearch will always be in the form of XXXX-XXX, but that is not correct -- over time, they will be in the format "XXXX-XXXX" and even beyond that.
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