Place Advisor Error

Jay Fletcher

unread,

Nov 22, 2023, 11:54:46 AM11/22/23

to GEDitCOM II Discussions

I really love Place Advisor, and I have been using it successfully to correct and update all of the places in my GEDCOM. However, I get an error when trying to merge information from Place Advisor into one particular place. The place is Hanover, District No. 2, Manitoba, Canada. The error message is as follows:

Error downloading place information

The returned text does not contain a dictionary marked with brackets {} (open Console to see the response)

I have checked the console and I don't see any errors related to GEDitCOM II. I hope that someone here will be able to help.

Thank you,

Jay

Jay Fletcher

unread,

Nov 22, 2023, 2:49:20 PM11/22/23

to GEDitCOM II Discussions

I'm getting the same error when I use Place Advisor for Rhineland, Division No. 3 [census division], Manitoba, Canada. Perhaps the square brackets are causing a problem?

John Nairn, Developer

unread,

Nov 23, 2023, 12:41:24 PM11/23/23

to GEDitCOM II Discussions

Apple has made the Console almost useless. The MacOS posts so many message so fast that by the time you look, the GEDItCOM II messages are long gone. They are some ways around it. When I run in "developing" mode, I get a console for GEDitCOM II only. Here is the missing message:

HTTP Request Response: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">

<html><head>

<title>500 Internal Server Error</title>

</head><body>

<h1>Internal Server Error</h1>

<p>The server encountered an internal error or

misconfiguration and was unable to complete

your request.</p>

<p>Please contact the server administrator at

y...@example.com to inform them of the time this error occurred,

and the actions you performed just before this error.</p>

<p>More information about this error may be available

in the server error log.</p>...

We will have to track this down. I does not happen for all places, so must be something about the two you found. It is not the square brackets because those are not used when contacting the server. My initial guess is that a point of interest (POI) for some places might have characters that mess up the response.

John Nairn

Jay Fletcher

unread,

Nov 23, 2023, 3:19:32 PM11/23/23

to GEDitCOM II Discussions

This error occurs for any place in a "Division" in Manitoba, Canada with a single digit Division number.

John Nairn, Developer

unread,

Nov 30, 2023, 12:09:44 PM11/30/23

to GEDitCOM II Discussions

Before seeing your email, we diagnosed the same thing. To make those divisions sort correctly, the "Place Advisor" data base puts two spaces between "No." and a single digit number but only one space between "No." and a double digit number. The Place Advisor then sends a message to GEDitCOM II with the selected name. Although the message is sent withg two spaces. internal MacOS coding remove extra spaces before passing on to GEDitCOM II.

We are working on a fix now. It will likely required waiting for the next version of GEDitCOM II, but that almost ready anyway. Now new version will wait until I fix this issue (I could post a test version sooner?). In the meantime, it only affects places that use extra spaces for alignment. It is possible that "Division No. 1" to "Division No. 9" in Canadian provinces on the only ones in the world. Rather than look for more (such as places that accidentally have extra spaces), the plan is to fix the spacing problem.

John Nairn

Jay Fletcher

unread,

Dec 26, 2023, 2:14:08 PM12/26/23

to GEDitCOM II Discussions

Thank you, John. Has this issue been fixed in the latest Beta version? I don't see any Beta versions in Downloads section of the website. How can I download the latest Beta?

Jay

Reply all

Reply to author

Forward