Unitrunker 17 crashing - "invalid date"

[robbinsj2]

Unitrunker keeps crashing for me when I try to open (double-click) a talkgroup for editing from the Groups tab. I have noticed an apparent link between this happening and the group I'm trying to open showing a first hit of "Invalid Date".

I'm running Unitrunker 1,0,0,17 on Windows Vista Home Premium. I have noticed this on two different systems, both 800MHz EDACS wideband. The first hit shows as "Invalid Date" on many talkgroups because I added them manually instead of waiting for a hit on them. Initially it showed with a 1969 (I think) first hit date but at some point that changed to display "Invalid Date". I am unable to edit that field to something more acceptable (say 1/01/10) in the table view.

I'm reluctant to remove all those talkgroups from the data file, many are used very rarely at best (like Fleet Calls/ Agency Calls) and would take a very long time to populate. I could work around this by editing group info through the table but then I couldn't access notes I already put into the record or annunciation settings.

Any suggestions?

Jim

 

[SCPD]

The first hit shows as "Invalid Date" on many talkgroups because I added them manually instead of waiting for a hit on them. Initially it showed with a 1969 (I think) first hit date but at some point that changed to display "Invalid Date". I am unable to edit that field to something more acceptable (say 1/01/10) in the table view.

The timestamps are stored as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. However, the Americas have a negative timezone offset so this is displayed as December 31st, 1969. This all means the date was zeroed (eg. never set). A manually created talkgroup should have first/last seen timestamp of "now" (the time you created it) so this is clearly a bug.

I'm reluctant to remove all those talkgroups from the data file, many are used very rarely at best (like Fleet Calls/ Agency Calls) and would take a very long time to populate. I could work around this by editing group info through the table but then I couldn't access notes I already put into the record or annunciation settings.

You could manually set the first/last seen timestamps to something other than zero by editing the XML file in Notepad.

Talkgroups with a notes section appear in the XML like so:

<Talkgroup id="1234" label="No Name FD" first="23456789" last="56789012">Notes go here</Talkgroup>

Talkgroups without a notes section appear in the XML like so:

<Talkgroup id="1234" label="No Name FD" first="23456789" last="56789012" />

The problem here is the first/last timestamps are being stored as something invalid like <b>first="0"</b> or possibly <b>first="-1"</b>

With this in mind, here's a quick and dirty work-around:

Exit the program
Open the Unitrunker.XML file in Notepad.
Search for <b>First="0"</b> and <b>Last="0"</b>.
Replace the "0" with a much larger number
Repeat as needed.
Save the file.

Restart the program.

 

[robbinsj2]

On my system the time/date code seems to be stored as the actual time/date (not elapsed seconds since a certain base date) in the following format: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. I found the following time/date codes in the XML and apparently all causing problems:
19691231220000 (14 instances)
19691231230000 (77 instances)
19691231235142 (1 instance)

I did a search-and-replace using 198001010001 and it's working fine now. They display as 1979-12-31 in the program so there is a negative offset being applied, as you noted.

Thanks for your help!

Jim

 

[SCPD]

This is fixed in release 18.