Item2554: META:TOPICPARENT{} is shown as naked macro

it is common that a topic with default parent has this as the 2nd line in the txt file.

%META:TOPICPARENT{}%

Ie an empty value. It maybe be modern Foswiki's put something but old webs are stuffed with these.

Someone have recently changed trunk so that the %META:TOPICPARENT{}% is seen as the naked macro instead of being invisible.

What is more strange is that it is only seen in Firefox and not in IE??!!

-- KennethLavrsen - 02 Jan 2010

Confirmed. I remember Crawford did some changes parsing META:TOPICPARENT in trunk so that these suddenly started showing up. The META parser now considers META:TOPICPARENT{} being "invalid" in some sense.

Afaics, this is not browser specific as this is real data in the markup sent to the browser.

-- MichaelDaum - 03 Jan 2010

Yes, that's not a syntactically valid topicparent, it is missing values that do not have reasonable defaults. The reason I put those checks in was to prevent the scenario where an incomplete %META in a topic was crashing foswiki, when some innocent coder tried to access an attribute that had not been defined.

If this behaviour is unacceptable, then on line 2903 of Foswiki/Meta.pm - return '' instead of $expr. It would be wise to add such an erroneous TOPICPARENT into the unit tests as well.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 19 Jan 2010

It is unacceptable.

We have many of these topics in old webs which means at some point TWiki had a bug that produced these. We have to deal with that. We cannot ignore that if we are serious about telling people they can upgrade from TWiki to Foswiki.

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Jan 2010

Will this soon be fixed. It annoys me like crazy to see these unresolved macros everywhere. I never know if it is a new bug or this old one.

-- KennethLavrsen - 14 Mar 2010

I changed the rules for TOPICPARENT to allow a name, rather than require it. This allows an empty TOPICPARENT. I visually inspected the code where it is used, and believe that there are no cases where a missing name attribute will crash the code, but it wasn't an exhaustive test.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 15 Mar 2010