Why does WikiTree abort all inputs to a record if a date is not formatted 'correctly'?

Question

Three times, I've put an new person's record in, and WikiTree did not like the D/M/Y format and aborted the entire record rather than present it to me to fix?
In most records WikiTree allows D/M/Y, but for marriages Not? This is terribly inconsistent!  The input screen should give that clue up front!

Comments

You might want to review this: Help: Date Fields - Input Formats

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Add bugs as a tag since others are saying there might be a problem

Answer 1

Jim, when an error is encountered, no work is done.  The software first performs a check and, when it enounters an error, stops at that point, therefore it never gets up to creating or editing a record.  There's no point in arguing the merits of this - this is how it's done.

There are several date formats that the software accepts.  I'm not sure what you're entering when you write "D/M/Y".  Slashes are accepted in date fields, but it must be MM/DD/YYYY format - that's 2 digit month, slash,  2 digit day, slash, 4 digit year.  It is forgiving enough for you to enter 1 digit month and day numbers without putting a "0" in front of them, but the year must be 4 digits.

You can also enter a date as DD Mon YYYY or Month DD, YYYY.  I believe there are a few others that are also accepted.

You can check the Help Page for Dates for a complete explanation.

Comments

Perhaps, then, a software request: When a date error is encountered, put the user back to the input page that still contains his/her data for correction.

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There are certain functions that are performed on the server (meaning after the information you enter on a page has been transmitted to WikiTree) and writing to the database is among these.  There are other functions that can be performed on the client (meaning by your browser before you transmit the page to WikiTree) using javascript.  Once you transmit the information to WikiTree, it is no longer available to your browser.

The only way to do what you are asking for would be for WikiTree to create a new page, populate it with the information you submitted, and send it back to you.  This would require a significant amount of programming effort to do (including only doing it when a processing error is encountered) and would use a significant amount of server resources (which would slow down other things being done by the server at the same time).

I understand your request, and you have a very good reason for asking for this, but unfortunately the extra work and overhead required to do it make it unreasonable to hope that it will happen.

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I encountered a similar error. The date was correct, but somehow it was changed to dashes (I never use dashes) as separators. I corrected that, and the date showed formatted correctly, but it would not save and kept saying invalid date. I could use the back key and start over, but the same error kept occurring (even though the date showed formatted correctly dd mmm yyyy. I had to simply close the browser and start over to accept the profile.

Answer 2

Are you using the forward slashes? That might be why.  Slashes are a 'forbidden character'.