Export Errors

To reproduce:
1. Log in as "StJosephIssaquah" at https://www.librarything.com
2. Go to "Export as Excel" page: https://www.librarything.com/export.php?export_type=xls
3. Click the "Export all books" button OR check the "Tags" box, enter "prayer", then click the "Export filtered" button.

Bug: When I try to open the exported file, I get this message in Excel: "We found a problem with some content in 'librarything_StJosephIssaquah.xls'. Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes." I click "Yes", then the file opens with this message, "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content."

The file appears to only contain bookids, the sort character(?) and publication dates.

I also get this recovery log opened up in another application I have on my computer: "Errors were detected in file '/Users/kristidebree/Downloads/librarything_StJosephIssaquah.xls'" ... "Excel recovered your formulas and cell values, but some data may have been lost."

I believe this Excel export problem is related to size of file. I tried it in two of my LT libraries and it worked for 3, 37, & 56 book exports but not for attempts at 186, 459, 1515 or 3495 item exports.

If it helps, the last time I successfully exported a larger file (207 books) was on Nov. 6, 2022.

>4 StJosephIssaquah: That's good to know. I'll try testing around.

(I thought that the author name on https://www.librarything.com/work/58647/book/232220943 might be causing an issue, but I tried exporting without that book and still got the errors. I'll keep trying.)

Another report about this, I believe, from MavenMatilda:

I am getting the following error when I try to add any books or edit any:
"Sorry, there was a problem with the database"

It looks like the record with LT id:

225914015

has subsequent records stuffed into its Title field.

I've attached a tsv export file that shows the data corruption. This is a *partial* export of MavenMatilda -- just the records around where the data corruption is.

The attached file will partially import into Libre Calc

Go to line 50 and you can see subsequent records stuffed into the Title cell.Libre Calc then stops with a too much data in cell error.

I can bring up the edit screen on all books however I cannot save them -- I get the "problem with the database" error.

Hopefully some clues there?

>6 kristilabrie: An update on "Sorry, there was a problem with the database" error:
I am now able to export 21,400 records successfully into Libre Calc and no longer have the above error message.

The problem seemed to be due to double quotes " in book records. I think any field would have had the problem -- I saw it in Title, Summary, and Dewey Wording. There were multiple places where Libre Calc would reach maximum characters per cell if the cell had double quotes -- subsequent rows would be stuffed into the cell until character maximum per cell was reached. It would then correctly show good subsequent rows until it hit the double quote problem again. I am using UTF-8 encoding.

I made some headway by removing double quotes from Title and Summary in LT in some records, and then export again. As I did this, some records began to update correctly and the "Sorry..." error was gone. The export was still bad for other rows, however.I could not fix the problem this way if the quotes were in Dewey Wording. I tried deleting the book record and re-entering via Manual Entry. I also tried mangling the title so that LT should not be able to look up the Dewey number. No luck. I separated the book from the Work record also. That failed.

What worked in Libre Calc was to remove " from the String Delimiter configuration in Text Import. All records then imported to Calc. It is possible that some records may be mangled, but so far I have not found any. Updates to MavenMatilda are now very slow, however. I need to do further testing, thus I am not yet closing out this issue. I will update this post with what I find out.

I do not know if the above works in Excel or other work-alikes. I hope this information is useful in any case.

L

This is great! I will pass this along to ccatalfo to take a look, hopefully this will be the fix we need. Thanks so much for your help.

I'm guessing that the problem is with some fields containing an odd number of double quotes.

"title" TAB "author" is fine.
"title TAB "author" is not.

A way to check it would be to export as TSV and importing that into excel or localc (hoping for a better error message or an option to interpret double quotes and TAB's in a more sensible way).

I am still having the same problem. Using Excel, I was able to download several smaller searches of about 90 books recently but just tried a larger search of about 400 books and it failed - message said to contact ~you. I've dug deeper and found more recent large downloads than I cited about in 1. The last larger download I have record of was on February 25, 2023 when I downloaded 403 items. In January, I'd downloaded nearly the same size search. The last time I downloaded and saved our entire collection was in 2016. At that time we probably had in the range of 3000 items. From 2013-2016 we downloaded it weekly -just in case.

Same with Excel and with Tab-Delimited Text.

Nothing exports and I get the mesage

"Some sort of error prevented your export from completing. Please contact LT Support for assistance."

The "LT Support" doesn't work as a link.

>11 Lisa2013: Regarding contacting support, aside from reporting here in bug collectors, you can contact staff by following 'Contact' link at the bottom of each page, where you'll find all relevant emails

>12 SandraArdnas: Thanks, Sandra. I suspect that by now they know about this issue. I might use the Contact link if this goes on for a long time without a fix or an update.

I am having the same error messages when trying to export our catalog.
"Some sort of error prevented your export from completing. Please contact LT Support for assistance." I downloaded a smaller subsection of the catalog several days ago with no problem, but now I can't download anything. Trying to export as excel or tab delimited file.

>11 Lisa2013: I had the exact same experience. It's dismaying the link doesn't work!

I'm also having this issue when I try to export to Excel or tab delimited text. It gets part way through then I get the message "Some sort of error prevented your export from completing. Please contact LT Support for assistance". And as noted, the LT Support appears to be a hyperlink but isn't clickable. I'm hoping this will be resolved when folks show back up to work on Monday. And then I'm moving my weekly backups of my LT records to a weekday!

>10 MaryQueenofPeace: >11 Lisa2013: >14 artassociationjh: >15 the_red_shoes: >16 jztemple: I believe your export issue is more closely related to https://www.librarything.com/topic/350647, so please follow along there for updates. I'm looking at it now.

>17 kristilabrie: Thank you for fixing my exporting problem! I am able to export large files now! I will also post this under this other topic, which you refer me to here.

>17 kristilabrie: Kristi - Export has stopped working. I work in 2 libraries and tried to export MaryQueenofPeace today and it got to "500 processed" and quit saying I should contact support.
I then tried my other library StJosephIssaquah and was able to export the entire collection but only some of the columns came thru and I got 2 warnings. The 1st warning from Excel said problem w content & offered to try to recover what it could - if I trusted the source. I said recover. The 2nd warning came when I opened the document after Excel recovered what it could - that warning said that editing the document could harm my computer. The recovered export gave me all 3526 items but only columns A, C, I, W, X, AK, AN, AS. (Those columns = LT #; # of spaces for a, an, the; Publication date; LCCN; Entry date; Dewey; # copies; unknown #).

>19 MaryQueenofPeace: reported at https://www.librarything.com/topic/352137 with some added comments from members, for ccatalfo's reference.