Validating Your Project
Checking for Errors
Multideck automatically checks your deck for errors as you work. Certain kinds of errors can prevent your project from being printed or exported.
Card Items that have errors or warnings will (by default) be marked with a badge (a small icon) when you are not in Preview mode. To see a description of the error, hover the mouse pointer over the badge.
Card item 'Power2' displaying an error badge.
Error badges are never displayed when in Preview mode, nor do they appear in printed or exported output. If you wish to turn them off altogether, use the Validation Display button in the Card Layout Toolbar to toggle between showing all error badges, showing error but not warning badges, and showing no badges.
The Validation Display button.
Some errors are not associated with individual card items. Whenever there are any errors at all, the Validate button in the window toolbar will show an error badge. To see a full listing of all errors, select the menu command File > Validate Your Project, or click the Validate button in the toolbar.
Validation will not check cards or templates that have been excluded from printing or exporting by the Filter feature. See Filtering for more information.
Types of Errors
There are three categories of errors:Content errors are errors found in your content, such as malformed expressions or image filenames that can't be found in the Images Folder. You must fix these by editing your content. (Well, usually. If an image can't be found, it might be a typo in your content, or you may have forgotten to add that image file to your Images Folder.)
Layout errors are problems with the items in your layout. You must fix these in the Layout tab.
Template errors are problems with your template that would prevent any cards from being printed at all. You fix these in the Deck tab by ensuring that every template has non-empty content, and an Image Folder if necessary. (An Image Folder is required only if the template's content specifies images.)
Warnings
Validation can also issue warnings. Warnings are like errors, except that they do not prevent printing or exporting. For example, you are warned if there is a column in your content that is not referenced anywhere in your project. This is not an error because you may have a legitimate use for columns which are not used as card content.When you are trying to print or export, and validation finds warnings but no errors, you will be shown the warnings and you may decide whether to continue or cancel. (You can make changes to this policy by setting appropriate Validation Options. See below for details.)
The Validation Results Window
Validation results are shown to you like this:
Validation results
The illustration above shows the results of checking a project named "tictactoe". The project had three templates, named Good, Bad, and Funky. (This project was created to illustrate validation errors, and the template names reflect that.)
Each error has a line of text explaining the issue, followed by some text in brackets. The bracketed text tells you where the error was found, like this:
[ document, template, layout, item, card index ]
For example, the second error listed ("Invalid template") tells us that the error occurred in the document "tictactoe" and the template named "Bad". (Note that no layout, item, or card index was given in that error because template errors apply to the whole template and not to particular items or cards.)
The first error listed under Content is reporting a missing image file. The error is in the "Good" template, the "Front" layout, in the item named "Board Image", and in the second card listed in that template's content.
Validation tries to avoid useless repetition. If multiple similar errors are found, they may be reported as a single error.
Finding the Source of Errors
A line reporting an error or warning may show the 🔎 icon. Clicking this icon will open the Deck tab, Layout tab, or Content Editor (as appropriate) and, if possible, select the card item or content which caused the error. No 🔎 icon will be shown for errors that have no precise location, or for errors whose location cannot be presented by Multideck: for example, content errors when the content source is an external CSV file.The Copy Button
Click the Copy button to copy the validation results to the clipboard. (This is the only reason that the document is listed in the error reports, since only the frontmost document is checked. If you paste the results to save them elsewhere, you'll still know which document they're from.)Validation Options
The Validation Options panel lets you customize your validation results.
The Validation Options panel.
By default, all options are selected.
Whenever you attempt to print or export your deck, Multideck will automatically validate your project. If errors are found, you will not be allowed to print or export. (This cannot be changed.) If only warnings are found, by default you will be asked to confirm before proceeding (that is, you are asked whether it's okay to ignore the warnings).
If you do not leave "Report warnings before Print or Export" selected, you will not be asked to confirm before printing or exporting when warnings are found in your project. You can still see the warnings by selecting the menu command File > Validate Project or by clicking the Validate toolbar item.
The other three options control whether certain kinds of warnings are reported. If you turn them off, those warnings will not be reported. For example, if you de-select "Warn about unused columns", unused columns found in your content will not be reported by validation (and so they will not interfere with printing or exporting). You would have to re-select this option and then validate again to find out whether your project contains any unused columns.
We recommend using this mechanism instead turning off the "Warn about unused columns" option, which would suppress all such warnings.