Trouble creating a DBL bundle

Question

Although I have successfully managed to create a DBL bundle in the past, I’m completely stumped this time as I attempt to make a DBL text bundle, but Paratext keeps insisting that there are errors (so it can’t proceed). I have tried this in both 7.6 and in 8.0 but with no joy so far. What else can I check to get around this problem?

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When I run the basic checks (with the Schema check) for these two sample books (LUK and ACT), then I get the message that there are no errors. So why is the Create DBL Text Bundle tool unwilling to go forward?

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Any help from someone else who has hit this problem before would be much appreciated. Maybe related to this is the message that the metadata.xml file is missing - but I don’t know what to do about that. I have a Project Canon with just LUK and ACT included, but that’s as far as I managed to get.
I feel that if we are expecting others to submit their texts to the DBL, then this whole process needs to be more user-friendly.
MarkP

Answer 1

Mark,

First, it appears that you actually have two Canons defined for this project. So although LUK/ACTS passes, the one that has all the Protestant books does not. So, you need to delete the Protestant canon in order to create a bundle with just LUK/ACTS.

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Secondly, I’m not aware of any Back Translations that have been uploaded to DBL to be available for Library Card Holders (publishers). If you are just trying to make a Back Translation available as a Paratext Resource, there is another path to do that. After you tweak your Canons file to have the books you want in the Resource, do SHIFT click Tools > Advanced > Create DBL ParaTExt Resource Bundle . This pathway does not do validation checks, since it is just concerned with how material is presented in Paratext, not about making the USX clean for publishers to process.

Otherwise when encountering strange errors in Create DBL Text Bundle you may force a USX export to disk, ignoring errors this way: 1) Cancel the login dialog to DBL, 2) select To Disk, and then 3) hold down SHIFT when you click “Check For Errors”. That will produce the zip files and metadata.xml file that anon467281 was talking about.

Comments

Hi anon020041,

Thanks for your help. Yes - that was the problem (I needed to
DELETE the unwanted Canon). After that it worked great. It seems
strange that it tries to create all the Canons rather than just the
default one. Hopefully the developers and/or documentation people
are listening in and will make the help/guide for this area more
useful to others. Perhaps there is a good reason for this, but it
certainly isn’t obvious from the UI.

I'm just trying to create a sample DBL Bundle for local testing -
understanding how Glyssen works to tag speakers within a text prior
to doing a dramatized recording - hence the BT of our project. That
part went remarkably smooth - and it is impressive to see how much
is done "automagically" for you.




Thanks also for the tip on holding down SHIFT while selecting Tools
> Advanced > etc. Someone asked me a week or so ago if these
kinds of "tips and tricks" in Paratext are actually documented
somewhere, or whether we just learn them by word of mouth from each
other. I'm hoping that the developers will eventually get rid of
these undocumented/mysterious/hidden ways of working with Paratext.




Blessings,


Mark

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Glad it worked for you, @Mark+P The “default” Canon setting I think is there to help publishers process the content. As far as I know it has no functional value in Paratext itself. I would like to understand the use-cases of why you would define more than one canon, but only produce bundles on less than what is defined. I think “the always produce all the canons if the books are ready” approach is geared more towards DBL use cases, where we wouldn’t want the user to upload a Protestant Canon on one upload, but on a subsequent upload just select a Catholic one, because then DBL would think that you are actually removing the Protestant Canon on the second upload. Though I could see the case where one Canon is defined like you like, whereas others may be more in “draft” level. Also perhaps some canons are for DBL, while others are more for “To Disk” purposes.

As for the special hidden SHIFT features, we do that for special advanced features that we don’t want people to use unless they really know what they are doing and why they are doing that. I think over time these will become less and less hidden as we incorporate the features in ways that help users use the software properly.

Answer 2

ark

Not sure if this will help with trackjng down the problem.

You might try exporting through the uploader to "Disk" instead of
the DBL (a tick box at the bottom of the dialog box doing the
upload....then open that copy...sometimes it's easier to see errors
in this way.

This will let you select a folder to export to. Look in there at the
.usx files and see if they give a clue. Explorer will navigate to the
newly created folder. Look inside the source.zip. I had a similar
problem a while ago but don’t recall this method giving me anymore clues.

Sorry to not be of anymore help.

D anon467281

Global Publishing Services
Scripture Typesetting trainer & Regular Expression “specialist”
Dallas, TX

Answer 3

+RSquared - thanks for the hint on what the problem might be. But where do I start looking for these missing dependencies?
+anon467281 - yes, I’m trying to write to Disk (rather than the DBL) but I’m still getting this error message; so it must be something else.

Does anyone else out there have some specific steps that I can try to get past this? I’m trying to make a DBL bundle in order to test out how Glyssen performs in our language BEFORE we attempt to do this for real (for the entire NT) later in the year.
Thanks,
Mark