STK 4.2: Handling of Pure Line Breaks in LTXT Attributes

Hi Guys,
First of all a happy new you to all of you!

I just stumpled across some weird behavior of MI, but I'm not absolutely sure whether to blame MI oder STK for it =D

Let's have some long text attribut containing just a line break without anything else. It'll will look pretty inconspicuous in MI Viewer:

However, STK seems to parse that almost empty value to a "" instead of a "\n". But it doesn't set rec.is_empty() to true.

I wouldn't care about it if this would'n cause an error 500 upon import:

(attribute "Tradenames" of record "Alumino silicate - 1720" populated with a single blank)
db = mi.get_db("MI Training")
tb = db.get_table(name="MaterialUniverse")
rec = tb.get_record_by_id(hguid="ba22491d-b470-42cf-80d7-531ff81b1583")
tb.bulk_fetch(records=[rec], attributes=["Tradenames"], parallelize=True)
# Try to write the record without changes
rec.set_attributes([rec.attributes["Tradenames"]])
mi.update([rec])

DataImport_SetRecordAttributes failed with code 500 and message: Bad Request

It seems like it makes no difference whether the value is a single blank (" ") or a line break.
With STXT attributes, the behavior is similar but limited to blank, as one can't enter a line break in them. On the other hand, they're completely invisible in Viewer

I'm unsure whether I'd be happier with MI Viewer ignoring such a single character when clicking on "save" or STK parsing it correctly. And I admit that this is for sure nothing that's likely to happen often. However, maybe you guys have some possibility to adress it.

Best
Daniel

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Comments

Andy_Grigg

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for sharing this. The problem you've identified stems from a difference in behavior between MI Viewer and the underlying Service Layer API. We've raised it as an issue, and we'll report back if there are any changes made to the behavior.

Is there a specific reason you're creating attribute values only with whitespace? Or is this just a quirk of behavior that you've noticed?

Daniel Manocchio

Hi Andy,

you're welcome! :-)

There's no reason for such attribute values, it's just caused by mistakes of my users. And unfortunatly quite mean to track. Luckiliy, STK exhibits such values as AttributeValue.is_empty() == True in combination with len(AttributeValue.value) == 0, which makes them findable with some effort.

Andy_Grigg

Thank you, that's good information. In that case, it sounds like the focus is just closing this gap in behavior.