Does it work if you put Unknown as DOB? Only issue may be that it would default to 1/1/1650 on some exports making him 318, or was that a R2002 problem?

Gordon

Ha! too old if over 70? That wipes out about half of the recording community then, including my Dad who is well into his 70's still going stronger than ever - see:

http://patrickroper.co.uk

and

http://data.nbn.org.uk/datasetInfo/temporalMetadata.jsp?refID=5&dsKey=GA000655

A sensible solution to the odd requirement for a birth date if there is a death date would for for Recorder to automatically enter 'unknown' if the birth date is left blank. Tony, did you try entering 'unknown' as the birth date?

I was very impressed that he made it onto the Harry Hill' TV Burp review of the year! :cool:

I have checked and like last time I tried, if you enter unknown as DoB, you can't enter anything except unknown as DoD, because the "date of birth cannot contain the date of death"!!!!?

It's an issue with the Recorder UI (the validation add-in perhaps?) rather than the model. Although Recorder 200x and 6 have been around for ~10 years, only very few people, relatively speaking, have been using it to its full potential in that time and therefore problems such as this have gone unnoticed. I don't think I've ever entered a date of death without a date of birth before in my 7 or so years using Recorder and so I've never come across this problem before. If I had I would have reported it, as I do with most problems I encounter. If others have encountered this problem, then they have not reported it either. The thing is, if nobody reports a problem like this, then it'll never get fixed!

So, the moral of the story: if you come across a bug or unexpected behaviour with Recorder, report it.

I've just tested this problem re DOD and DOB and can confirm the faulty behaviour. We should be able to enter a DOD without first having to enter a DOB. I would suggest that if a DOD is added without a DOB, the DOB field is automatically populated with the 'unknown' value. Also, manually entering 'unknown' into DOB and then entering a valid date into DOD should not trigger the "Date of Birth cannot contain the Date of Death" prompt.

Thanks Mark, I was just about to point that out (since I contributed to that thread also i think)

Dear all, this bug was logged and is on the waiting list to be fixed.

Another date problem is Location Designation From and To. I'm putting in an SSSI Notification date of 1984 as the From date and get this message;

The start date must be a valid standard date and it cannot be after today's date of 13/07/2010.

Is 1984 not a standard date? The help just says enter a standard date!

Tony

Thanks Mary, I do have a major concern though. Many of the things I see being wrong at present means that they are likely to never be corrected if and when Recorder is fixed.

I want to be able to correct information when it needs correcting. I have no intention of spending my time making notes of all the items I cannot do because the program does not work now. The whole point is to save time not waste it. I would like to clean my data at and present I can see little point in attempting this task if so many things are on-hold until someone decides it's worth fixing.

I went through this in Recorder3, though of need rather than bugs, and had to develop solutions to deal with things. I guess I was expecting it to be working by now and all I seem to do is find things that no one has tried to do yet or not reported as not working. This is very disheartening. I seem to find something every day I use it, even if they are related. I'm being thwarted at every turn. Funny thing is I was persuaded to not develop my own solution because this was to be so great.

So what £500,000 and 10 years later.......Recorder 6. I know this sounds gloomy but it is I'm spending too much time with problems rather than solutions and am yet to really start using it for it's intended purpose.

Is there someone to write to with our concerns?

Hi Tony and Mary
An interim solution might be to enter the date of birth as - followed by the date before the date of death. E.g. for a DOD of 1973, enter "- 1972" as the DOB, meaning an unknown time leading to 1972. But I agree this is a horrid solution to a silly niggle.