"Add Works" form down?

[peftypefty]

This was my first time trying to use the "Add Works" form, and when I finished filling it out and submitted it, all that came back was an unformatted page that said "Cannot Update Table".

I checked to make sure my filenames existed etc. and can't figure out what I could be doing wrong.

So maybe the form itself (or the scripting behind it?) is down? Could somebody please check on this?

[choralia]

I've just tested the "add work" page by submitting an empty form, and I received an output code that seems consistent with the fact that I entered no information. The page was correctly formatted and there were no diagnostics, just empty fields. I would suggest to try again, perhaps it was just a temporary issue.

Regards.

Max

[peftypefty]

Thanks, I'll try again later today...

[choralia]

Through the "recent changes" page you may note that such a page was edited by somebody today (likely a spammer), and then reverted back to the last version by an administrator. So, I suppose the page was somewhat corrupted at the time you tried. The page has been restored and protected then.

Regards.

Max

[MandyShaw]

I had the same problem the first time I used the form. It turned out that I had a single quote (') in one of the fields. This form cannot cope with such a character, although any other method of editing ChoralWiki will have no trouble with it. If you leave out the single quote when filling in the form, you can always put it back in later.
Happy Christmas all.

[peftypefty]

Mandy, much thanks. I even had read the directions, but it didn't click because I hadn't typed any apostrophes myself, I had merely pasted them in within a block of pasted text....


Perhaps one of the following fixes could be worked out to prevent this known issue from taking up moderators' time in the future:
- The submission script could be programmed to tell the user that the problem was an unexpected apostrophe, rather than just generating a generic failure message.
- The submission script could be programmed to perform a find-and-replace on each text field, replacing
'
with
\'
although in practice this strategy may be problematic by way of being excessively invasive.

[MandyShaw]

I don't think any of the currently active admins has access to the programming/source code of the site - they can (and kindly do) simplify things for us all by creating and using wiki templates, etc., but I know they cannot change the Add Work form, for example. The owner of the site, Rafael Ornes, is the only person who can make programming changes as far as I know. Recently a lot of people have been working hard to improve the 'help' facilities, e.g. the score submission guide (including translation work), to make the site more usable without programming changes.