Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

What I’m working towards in these first few Betas is Behold’s stability. By that, I mean Behold should never crash. It should not result in a system error that prevents Behold from continuing which may require you open Windows Task Manager to stop it.

These system errors are called “exceptions”. The last alpha releases were very stable. I had over the years trapped or fixed every crash point I found. But the major changes between the last alpha and the first beta (virtualizing the Everything Report) have added some new ones. Also I’ve added an “exception” handler into Behold to catch not just the ones that Windows reports, but an even wider range of errors that previously went unreported or unnoticed. This is also allowing me to correct some code that I never knew was wrong, and that is good.

Then I also added the exception reporting mechanism, which brings up a custom screen and allows the user to send me the error message. At first it was quite onerous, but I think I’ve since fixed that and made it minimalistic and easier to use. The number of crashes I’ve been encountering have been going down, and so have the numbers users have reported to me (thank you all!).

Fairly soon (one or two beta releases from now), Behold should be back to being as stable as the alpha was. Once it’s there, I’ll finally feel confident enough in it to take the next step, send out the Behold News newsletter, and invite the world to try the beta (… and raise the price).

Yes there’s still lots of small things to fix, enhancements I want to make and unknown bugs left to find. I’m whittling away at those and will handle them rigorously when I start to redo the help file. We’re getting there.

Only 8 days later, but a new version was needed for a couple of important fixes: Scrolling should now all work properly without errors. And users signing up with a user name of 5 or fewer characters no longer will get an error when trying to enter it into the Info box in Behold.

I also had problems identifying why the recently used file list was not always getting updated. This was a component in the LMD ElPack that I was using for this. Rather than puzzling this through, I basically had the code without the component in the Find File and Forward/Back history lists. So I converted the recently used list to use my own code and that fixed the problem. It also changed a few minor appearance issues that now made that list more consistent with the other two. One minor byproduct of this change is if you upgrade to this version, you’ll lose your recently used file list in Behold, and will have to build it up again, which shouldn’t be too much of a bother.

All changes for this version are listed on Behold’s History page.

Ah, the CONC tag. It stands for Concatenate the line. It is put in a GEDCOM file to split a long line. For example:

2 NOTE This is a note that is sp
3 CONC lit on two lines.

The note will be put together and the word “split” will be reformed as one word. That is the way it is clearly defined in GEDCOM. There will always be a word split in the middle, with the first part of it on the previous line and the rest of the word being completed on the CONC line.

Many programs follow that standard, but there are a lot of programs that missed that little nuance in GEDCOM and decided to implement their GEDCOM output in what would seem straightforward:

2 NOTE This is a note that is split
3 CONC on two lines.

Here the split occurs after the word. What this means for a program like Behold is that it now has to add a space before concatenating the two lines. In the previous example no space was added.

Unfortunately there is nothing in the GEDCOM file telling you which method the program used. I could write a procedure to scan the file and “guess” what it is or some other form of artificial intelligence. I might be able to make that 98% accurate, but never 100%. So something is needed to change this if the assumed method is wrong.

What I have done in Behold is made a list of programs that use the correct CONC that splits words and does not require a space added. I assume all others use the “bad” CONC that does not split words but requires the space.

My current list of programs that outputs CONC correctly to GEDCOM is not very long. It includes PAF, Brother’s Keeper, Legacy, The Master Genealogist (TMG), RootsMagic and only some versions of Family Tree Maker. I haven’t rigorously gone looking for them. If you know of any others, I’d be happy to find out about them and I’ll add them into Behold.

That’s all wonderful. But then I found out that The Master Genealogist added a user option to allow them to output CONC tags the incorrect way, presumably so that the file can be read by programs that don’t understand the “correct” way. So now, I can’t even rely on a specific program always doing it the same way. Boo to TMG for that.

What I did was on my Organize GEDCOMs page, I now have a CONC value for each GEDCOM. It specifies how many spaces to add after concatenating lines, either 0 or 1. It will be automatically be set to what I’ve assumed is its program’s default. But now you can change that value and save it in with your Behold file so it can be remembered. The next beta release will include this.

So if in your notes as displayed by Behold, you see spaces where they shouldn’t be or two words put together where they shouldn’t be, it may either be that the CONC setting needs changing, or maybe the GEDCOM you’re looking at simply has tons of typos.

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Addenum: May 29, 2012: The maximum line length allowed in GEDCOM right back to version 5.3 is 255 characters. For some reason almost all programs chose to split their GEDCOM lines prior to them exceeding 80 characters (what the old punched card limit was). I’m not sure why that is. Maybe an earlier version of GEDCOM (5.0 or 4.x) had an 80 character limit.