Category sorting causing profile save error

Question

I'm now getting a profile save error that is new (the category has been i place a long time).

Change Before Saving

1. Category "Baronets Biddulph of Westcombe|5" contains invalid characters.

The problem is that the | is not an invalid character in the category name, but the marker for sorting, and for this particular category I have the baronets sorted in the order that they held the title. Right now I can't save the profile with the sort in place.

Comments

Hi Nicholas. Category sorting is described here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Category_Creation_and_Removal#Changing_the_sort_order

My impression is that the sorting is for subcategories, not profiles. This would mean you cannot use the pipe character and the sort parameter in a category line on a profile, but only on a category page when linking to a parent category. 

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It does read that way. However, it has always worked for FreeSpace pages and profiles. If you look at the category in question, you can see that the other names are not alphabetically. It seems pointless to block a useful behaviour that works.

Presumably something has changed in the last couple of days or so that this check now appears when saving.

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I may be missing something, Nicholas, but I don't see that. Category: Baronets Biddulph of Westcombe has one Michael Biddulph followed by six Theophilus Biddulphs: isn't that alphabetical? They are not in chronological order.

Answer 1

You cannot sort profiles within a category; you can sort CATEGORIES (subcategories) within a category. Free-space pages are actually profiles, so it does not work for them either.

The several Theophilus Buddulphs seem to be sorted by birth date and the category is sorted alphabetically. The pipe and number have not made a difference. Try another category with several different names (in other words, not 5 people with the same name!) to test your theory.

Answer 2

We introduced some validation to prevent disallowed characters from being used in category names. This check is currently only on person profiles.

I'm fairly certain that sorting with a pipe doesn't work with person profiles because we already override the default sort to sort by the person's name (or by WikiTree-ID if the category is very large).