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    Records with non-Roman script crashing the cataloging GUI

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    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 18.01

    Description:
    We have 4 records in our database that cannot be edited because every time we try to retrieve them the cataloguing client crashes. How do I go about trying to find what is wrong with those records?

    The records display fine in the Web OPAC.

    Resolution:
    [From Corinna Baksik, Harvard:]

    Ex Libris has a powerpoint on their Doc Center about this problem. It's called "Directionality solution in right-to-left and left-to-right field display."

    In short, there are certain Unicode formatting control characters that cause the client to crash, a problem that can be fixed by a new DLL file for the desktop. The revised file from Ex Libris stopped our clients from crashing.

    Staff have found these characters primarily in Arabic records, and we are stripping them out for now, as most of the time we encountered them they didn't seem necessary, and they don't exist in MARC8 anyway so removing them from UTF8 records maintains the status quo. If anyone has comments on this I'm very interested in hearing them.

    I reported a record to OCLC once because I couldn't figure out why it had so many of these control characters, and the reply I received was "The use of the direction control characters is an attempt to force the correct display, but what worked in RLIN doesn't necessarily work in Connexion. Based on assurances from the RLG people that it was necessary to use and retain these control characters, we implemented them prior to the initial RLIN load and set up our processing to retain them in all incoming records... At this time there is no plan to eliminate the problem, but there is discuss[ion] of investigating further to see if we can put a project in place to correct the records. "

    [From Ana Fidler, UC-Santa Barbara:]

    Based on Yoel's Powerpoint, the 2 dlls that prevent the client from crashing are Log2Vis.dll and UniCType.dll. Both of them were present in my C:\WINDOWS\system32 but they were an older version. The Cataloging client no longer crashes now that the newer versions have been installed. [See KB 16384-7234 for details.]

    Note: the gui500.exe delivered with every service pack has more than just Aleph binaries. It may have Windows "dll"s which cannot be delivered with the version check mechanism.

    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013