Page 1 of 1

DM 5.84 on Win 10 - state abbreviations being changed

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 3:32 pm
by djklord
I have been using DM 5.84 on Windows 10 ever since I upgraded to Win 10 - soon after it became available. A few days ago I imported data (Wycliffe CSV format) and DM changed the state abbreviations to have a lowercase letter for the second letter. (The input data was correct.)

This caused every gift to enter validation - pointing out that a change had occurred in the state name.

I have not updated DM since 5.84 came out, so this must have been caused by some Windows update.

Has anybody else seen this?

Is there a workaround?

Re: DM 5.84 on Win 10 - state abbreviations being changed

Posted: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:43 pm
by jmuehleisen
Hi Dan,

Interesting problem, and I've not seen this before.

Do let me encourage you, however, to upgrade your DM to the DM 6 series.

Lots of new reports and features in that version, and I'll be glad to help if you get stuck.

Re: DM 5.84 on Win 10 - state abbreviations being changed

Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2020 2:48 am
by snofriacus
Hi Dan & John,

Today I found a workaround for this issue. I'm using DM5 on Windows 7. In April of 2018 I received contribution info via the old WBT html format for the last time, so as of the following month I had to begin using the WBT csv format (WBT Unity CSV) and ran into this issue, of the state abbreviations no longer coming through as all caps. This was making the address checking process tedious, since every one was now flagged as different from what was already in the database.

What I finally learned today is that at some point there was an issue with the WBT Unity CSV format - that it was using the full names of states in place of the normal state abbreviations. So DM had been adjusted to work around that, converting the full names back to the abbreviations. But then some time later the issue was fixed in the WBT Unity format - now using the correct 2-letter all-caps abbreviations. And apparently that's what brought on the problem. DM didn't know to expect these correct abbreviations in a WBT Unity CSV file, so they ended up being subjected to a case change rather than just passing straight through as is.

The workaround that's now working for me is to first tweak the CSV file by converting the state abbreviations to full state names, and then importing to DM, DM then correctly recognizes the states and converts them back to the desired 2-letter all-caps abbreviations.

Allan J