Articles on: Troubleshooting

Resolving document or note validation errors

If you're looking at this article, you've probably come across an error when sending a document or a note from WriteUpp. This is most likely due to a validation error within your file. If any validation errors are detected, you'll see a message regarding a validation error when attempting to send it.

What causes these errors?

These errors are caused by some broken background formatting within the content of the file, and normally aren't visible when looking at your document or note on screen within WriteUpp. However, when you then click to send the file out from WriteUpp, as an email for example, the broken formatting prevents the file from being generated into a PDF file, to then be attached to the email. The broken formatting usually makes its way into WriteUpp if you copy and paste from another application, like MS Word.

Technical information on these errors

If you'd like to understand why this happens in a bit more technical detail, you can read on below. Alternatively you can skip to the next section to find out how to go about resolving these errors.

When you compose anything in WriteUpp, like documents or notes, the formatting of your content is built using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML uses a series of elements to build your file, which then tells your browser how to structure and display the page. Sometimes, especially if you copy and paste text from elsewhere, stray formatting is captured in the HTML and corrupts your finished file. When you then attempt to generate a file for printing or sending, this can cause a validation error and the file cannot be generated in a format to be supported outside WriteUpp, like as an attachment to an email.

If you try to email, print or direct message a file containing invalid formatting, you'll see a message advising that the document could not be generated:

How can they be resolved?

At this point, you won't be able to send the information until the error is fixed. If you need such an error fixed, please get in touch with the team on either support@writeupp.com or live chat, and let us know that you're seeing a validation error. With your permission, we can track down the corrupt HTML in your document and remove it for you. When you get in touch, please let us know:

What you are trying to send - Is is a document, a note etc?
The WUID of the client it relates to
What specific document or note you are trying to send - What is the name of the document? What is the date of the note?

A quick fix that you might like to try if a note/document is in draft, is to highlight all of the content of the note or document and then using your mouse right click and choose Cut. Position your cursor back at the start of the note/document, right click again and choose Paste and Match Style or Paste and Match Formatting, depending on your operating system. This will then paste the content back into the note/document, without any unsupported formatting. You might then need to use the tools available within WriteUpp to reformat your note/document. If you do this, we'd recommend that you make sure you save the note before cutting the content out, to make sure you have a history of the content saved.

We do have measures in place to detect and strip out unrecognised HMTL, which you might see especially when copying text from elsewhere into WriteUpp:

Unfortunately this doesn't pick up all instances of stray HTML that might be contained within a document or note, so we are continuing to improve how we handle this.

When copying and pasting into WriteUpp, we would recommend that you use the 'Paste and match style' or 'Paste without formatting' options, depending on the operating system you are using. Once your text has been pasted into WriteUpp, you can then use the available tools to format it again. This will prevent any unsupported HTML formatting from being included within the text. Alternatively, you can enter your text by typing it directly into WriteUpp and using the available tools to format it. Please also bear in mind that while the document editors within WriteUpp contain some formatting options that are similar to those you might see in MS Word, they are different. As such, they don't have the same capabilities as Word.

Updated on: 10/11/2022

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