I pasted some text into a Work entry and it had extra spaces, so I hit "ctrl-F" to search for double spaces and replace them (a habit from using MSWord). Of course ctrl+F brought up the search bar, but I noticed that now that I had double spaces entered, a few weird entries were showing up. There were three arguments that were entirely blank, so I went to those three records and deleted each (using the "delete" button in the bottom right). There were also two very weird Institution entries: one that said ", Syracuse University" and the other ", New York University."
I went to the NYU one and (if I remember correctly) it took me to a department with a blank name, which belonged to NYU. I can't remember if I tried to delete this entry but I think the answer is no. Then (again if I remember correctly) I went to the NYU entry and noticed a blank department on the left. I right clicked on that to delete it, or to go to it, and (again, my memory is a little spotty) I think I clicked "go to this record" in the popup menu. Then I think the entry disappeared? Or maybe it took me back to the blank department and I deleted it using the button in the bottom right?
Anyways I tried to do the same thing with the Syracuse ghost department but at this point things were getting weird. If I go to the Institutions tab I am at NYU and cannot navigate away (e.g. I right click a department on the left and select "go to this record" and nothing happens. If I go to the Persons tab it's a blank entry and I can't navigate to anyone else (the arrows in the bottom left don't work). If I go to the Works tab I have the Work I was editing and that is open and I can type, but lots of the buttons don't work. "Accept Edits" does nothing, if I open up the Symbol thing I can click on things but no symbol is added, etc. The Italics button works fine and so on. Again I can't navigate using the arrows in the bottom left.
If I go to the Problems/Debates, Arguments, or Positions tab, only the top part of the UI loads, and it displays nothing. The bottom part is just gray. Ditto Notes and Terms.
If I try to save to XML I get an error (attached).
BUT: then I went to the tree and double clicked on something. It brought me to that thing (an argument I think). And then everything started working fine again.
So, nothing is wrong anymore. But, like, presumably there's a bug somewhere if you want to bother trying to figure out what happened. I still have the ghost department at Syracuse in my database so if I want to try to delete it maybe I can reproduce the bug, but I'll only have one go at it I think, because once that ghost is gone I will be out of ghosts.
Oh and I should add that if you really want to figure out what's going on I might have a backup of the database from a while back before I deleted all the ghosts except the Syracuse ghost.
Thanks for this. I assume you are using version 1.22?
Sounds like there is definitely a bug lurking somewhere but I'm having a hard time reproducing it by following your steps. The fact that you had blank entries in the database might not be a bug; occasionally I have found blank records that I figure I must have accidentally created without realizing it. But the null pointer exception (the error you attached) and inability to navigate off the record indicate a bug. Can you confirm that you can reproduce the error if you load the backup version of the database?
I noticed that when you delete a record, it doesn't get removed from the current list of search results in the search bar (but it doesn't show up if you change what is typed in the search bar). That is a bug I will fix, but I don't think that bug would cause the other stuff you were seeing; double-clicking a deleted entry in the search bar results doesn't do anything.
I've uncovered another bug in the Institutions tab that was the immediate cause of the error in the file you attached. It will be fixed in version 1.34.
That error was probably somehow a downstream result of the other bug I fixed, referenced in the previous post; under normal circumstances (without the other bug) I don't see a way the new bug I found would cause the error, which would explain why we haven't seen it happen since 2021.
I have still never reproduced this so it's hard to be 100% certain what you saw was caused by these two bugs, but I'm pretty confident that the underlying problems have now been addressed. I will go ahead and close this ticket.