Bib records created with empty fields

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 19.01

Description:
When I create a skeleton order record (in Cataloging) and save it to the server, it retains every single field I didn’t use and makes it blank. It used to wash those unpopulated fields away.

[Later:]
Today I asked our head of cataloging to create a skeleton record, and it displayed fine.

But then she pointed out that since v19 all our templates have boxes that display at the ends of their text fields, as well as in empty fields. She has been deleting the boxes before saving the records.

I went to music librarian and asked her to display the template she uses. It was full of boxes in all the fields. She hadn't deleted the boxes before saving the problem record.

These boxes display in the cataloging GUI, but I can't see them when I display the templates in /exlibris/aleph/u19_1/abc01/pc_tab/catalog with "vi".

No one has mentioned the boxes to me to date, but I think cleaning up the templates will solve this problem, but how can I remove what I can't see?

Resolution:
I believe these characters are '^M' -- ASCII end-of-line characters -- which do not appear in "vi".

As described in KB 16384-1537, you can get rid of these characters by entering this command at the unix prompt on your server:

dos2unix xxxxxxxxx <where "xxxxxxxxx" is the name of the file> (on LINUX systems)
dos2unix -ascii xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx <where "xxxxxxxxx" is the name of the file> (on SUN systems)


After making this change, you will need to do util m/7 (to recreate the pc_cat.pck for resending to the pc).

KB 16384-1681 is a similar problem, except in that case the problem is the .xsl forms in the html.pck in the /form_eng directory.