Something strange has gone wrong

This document exists to collect possible strange failures in the package testing or documentation. These are issues we were aware of when implementing the relevant features but couldn't think of a good way to fix. They are collected here for future reference.

test_example_dataset suddenly fails

If an embargo date is provided, validation can only pass if this date is not in the past and is not more than two years into the future (at least for the default SAFE Project setup). test_example_dataset validates the Example.xlsx file which contains an embargo date. This means that once this date is in the past the test will suddenly fail without any modifications being made to any file.

Docs build fails with message "Docs build process has resulted in file changes."

As part of the documentation build process the update_command_line_usage.sh script is run. This generates updated versions of the command line usage .txt files. The docs build process then runs a check that the committed versions of the .txt files match with the updated versions. If files have been altered by the docs build process the job fails in order to indicate that the updated versions should be committed.

Tables in data format summary documentation suddenly incorrect

The tables in the data format documentation pages are all created based on the contents of Example.xlsx file. Most of the tables are generated from a specific sheet from the file. However, the small tables in the Summary documentation page are generated based on particular lines in the Summary sheet of the Example.xlsx file. The lines used to generate these tables are hardcoded, meaning that if the order of fields in the Example.xlsx is changed the table contents will become incorrect.