[GNC] gnucash 3.x corrupts data file

[John Ralls]

> On Nov 6, 2018, at 4:08 AM, Jörg Schaible <joerg.schaible at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> On Mon, 05 Nov 2018 02:30:39 +0000 David T. via gnucash-user wrote:
> 
>> Jörg,
>> Frank points you to the spurious date that is likely the source of your
>> trouble.
> 
> I guessed also.
> 
>> I believe that at some point, the developers put in a data
>> check into the upgrade process, to prevent errors from propagating
>> forward, which would explain the problem arising now.
> 
> That check seems not in place when a file from an older version is silently converted and when the file is 
> written ... :-/
> 
>> Perhaps you could
>> manually add a '3' after '201' before reopening the file.
> 
> I already tried this (but with 2018) and gnucash 3.3 still failed to open the file. But that was before I compared 
> the old and new file and recognized that the new version also removes the date-posted element (at least 
> when the value seems to correlate with 0).
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> But you were right. After correcting the gdate to 2013-01-02 and adding a matching date-posted element, I 
> could read the file with the latest version 3.3.

It’s failing to load because of the deleted date-posted element. It shouldn’t be deleted, 0 is now a perfectly valid date since 2.6.0. Slots aren’t evaluated at load time so that was just a distraction.

Can you file a bug about the XML backend eating  0 date-posted values?

Regards,
John Ralls