Bug in adding Marriage Date

+2 votes
282 views

I'm not sure if it qualifies as a bug, but I've just encountered a problem adding a spouse via the "connect an existing profile as her spouse" option.

Normally I'm adding a new person, and when doing so I fill in the marriage date in the dd-mmm-yyyy format, e.g. 21 Nov 1850. That's the same way I fill in dates of birth and death.

However, when I select "connect an existing profile as spouse" option, using that format issues an error, telling me I must use one of two other formats. I'm used to adding dates quickly so I blew through it the first time and wondered why the spouse hadn't been added.

Upon repeat, I entered Nov 21 1850 as instructed and it worked. And not only did it accept the data, but it then displayed it as 21 Nov 1850 - the format it refused to accept!

This seems extremely user unfriendly! I was adding a spouse for Swick-254, if that's any help to someone looking into it, but I think any profile works the same. I'd run into the same issue some while back but was very busy and didn't take the time to report it.

WikiTree profile: Mary Corson
in WikiTree Tech by George Fagin G2G1 (2.0k points)

2 Answers

+7 votes
Did you type in the date, or perhaps copy and paste it? Copy/paste is known to have some issues if there are stray characters (such as copying form a Word or Excel doc).

I just tried this on the Dev server and it accepted the 21 Nov 1850 format with no errors.
by Steven Harris G2G6 Pilot (812k points)
+4 votes
I'm pretty sure I typed it. And I'm dead certain about the formats it presented in the error message; dd-mmm-yyyy wasn't one of them.
by George Fagin G2G1 (2.0k points)

If you type it but then, for example, add a space accidentally -- which is a little hard to recognize, you'll get the same error as Steven mentioned even if you didn't add an odd character.

This is the error message I got from adding an extra space:

Please use YYYY-MM-DD or Month, DD, YYYY.

Good point, Dina. All user input for data fields should have leading and trailing spaces stripped off by the software, and internal multiple spaces reduced to one. This is easy to code, and saves a lot of grief.
Leading and trailing spaces should be stripped by the software (I just tested, and I didn't get an error). Extra whitespace between the various parts of the date can cause the system to not recognize the date as valid, as well as typos in the month name, choosing a date that doesn't exist (June 31), and copying invisible characters (such as a zero-width space).

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