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Category editing weirdness (losing categories on random waypoints)

Former Member
Former Member over 10 years ago
I have a large gpx file with about 750 waypoints and a bunch of tracks that was made on various devices and assembled on Basecamp. Each of the waypoints contains between 0 and a whole bunch of now meaningless categories. My gps unit, a BMW Navigator-V, helpfully displays an entry on the Saved Places screen for every single one of those categories which probably total 50 or more more unique categories. I want to get rid of all those categories in this gpx file and replace them with a single category which has some meaning to me.

In Basecamp at present there is only one way to do this: for each waypoint, "Get Info", then mouse to the References tab, place the cursor in the Categories field, do a command-a to select everything in that field, hit delete, type in your new category name and hit enter. Tedious, but doable.

I have my waypoints sorted by type and have started working my way through. At the end of each type I highlight all of the waypoints of that type, do a Get Info, tab to the References tab and look in the Category field. If I have successfully changed them all to the single category I will see only that category in the field. If I have missed one then I will see the word "multiple" in that field. Then I must hunt down the error and correct it. So I do that until I get a clean field, i.e., it just shows my category. Then I continue on and do the next type, check them etc.

Now the problem: If I check several types all together, all of which have previously passed the test when checked as one group, I will get the dreaded "multiple" tag and I will have to go back through the previously correctly tagged waypoints and I will find some that are now missing the previously entered tag! :confused:

The first type has 49 waypoints, the second has a single waypoint, then a group of 10 of a third type, and then a single entry of a fourth type. I have given up at this point since I cannot get these points all categorized properly using Basecamp.

Other info that may be of some help: my new category is three letters long: a capital letter, a lowercase letter and then another capital letter. That combination appears in some of the other unwanted categories so I get a populated list when I am typing such that I have to add a space after my category's name to isolate it and then press the enter key.

[P.S. If anyone knows how to get grep to match and select a random group of characters across new-line characters between <gpxx:Categories> and </gpxx:Categories> or even a bash script of some sort perhaps using awk and sed I would be perfectly willing to make the change that way :)]
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 10 years ago
    Since BaseCamp for some reason isn't able to Delete the contents of Category in a multi-select properties window, you might do what I do to clean up old BC "category" data. I use XMLEditor and just delete ALL "Category" tags. Then you could use BC to create your new Categories.

  • 0 over 10 years ago
    Clearly we need to take a look at that. One possible solution is to always make sure you leave the category pane when you're done with changing them. It is possible we aren't triggering an update correctly. You should be able to delete all the categories in a group by deleting them in the category pain.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 10 years ago
    For xml editing on the Mac I use TextWrangler from Bare Bones. Its free and pretty capable and has a grep option built in in addition to the more normal ways of searching. I was trying to be precise and wanted to end up with a clean file in a single pass, i.e., no extra lines. But, now, I think I am going to follow your way and just delete all the category tags and then insert what I want.

    Which XML editor are you using - Googling xml editor produced a bunch of them, some of which were VERY expensive!

    There is a fix in the works for the multiple category delete issue in Basecamp.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 10 years ago
    Clearly we need to take a look at that. One possible solution is to always make sure you leave the category pane when you're done with changing them. It is possible we aren't triggering an update correctly. You should be able to delete all the categories in a group by deleting them in the category pain.


    Pretty sure it isn't my technique. This time I used a text editor to change the categories of those waypoints which had categories to a single category. Then after deleting the previous list and all its unique waypoints entirely in Basecamp I imported the new list whose categorized waypoints had only a single category. Then checking using Basecamp I found a few waypoints that had no category. For each of those I checked the raw XML and verified that in fact they had not been categorized in the input file. I manually entered a single Category in those waypoints.

    Then I found a waypoint in Basecamp which had 16 categories: When I checked my input file it had a single category. None of the 16 categories was the same as the single category. That waypoint somehow returned to what it was prior to the 16 x 2 edits I had made to it.

    I then exported the file from BaseCamp and searched the xml for the <gpxx:Category> tag and found 791 of them. Doing the same search on the input file there were only 745 such tags. So the import somehow added back 46 tags AND seems to have deleted the tags I had added for those waypoints!

    If you want the files, please let me know, I will have to get permission to send send you a link from the copyright holder which is doable I believe.

    EDIT: If I import the file into a new blank BaseCamp database it is fine! /EDIT
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 10 years ago
    Jack,

    I use XMLind XML Editor but the price of it has grown out of reach for most casual users. As you noted there are many free XML Editors and even TextWrangler works OK.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 10 years ago
    More info:

    I reloaded the original library from a backup and once again deleted the three lists one of which contained all the waypoints and the other two which contained subsets. When the system warned me about non-duplicates in the lists I allowed it to delete those also. So, at the end of that evolution my library should have contained none of the waypoints from those three lists which were unique to those lists. It theoretically could still contain some waypoints from those lists if they were in other lists, i.e., they were non-unique.

    Next I exported the "Unlisted Data" list as a gpx file and then went up to the library base-folder, highlighted all items and exported those as a gpx file.

    Then I looked at both files in a text editor once again searching for the <gpxx:Category> tag. In the "Unlisted Data" file I found three waypoints that had such tags but none of them were from the deleted lists. When I looked at those waypoints in Basecamp they were all associated with active lists! Then they should NOT have been in that "Unlisted Data" list.

    In the whole library gpx I found a bunch of waypoints with category tags from the deleted lists and upon examination in Basecamp using Get Info they were in no lists!

    Absolutely none of this makes any sense!

    If a waypoint is NOT associated with a list it should be in the Unlisted Data list, and that should be irrespective of whether or not it has been associated with a category.
  • 0 over 10 years ago
    A very long shot here, but this sounds suspisciously like this could <possibly> be related to some very weird behavior I noticed with BaseCamp and my old 478 units, first reported in this forum well over a year ago.

    Somehow BaseCamp noted the category information contained in waypoints transferred from the 478, retained the information, and re-set the categories internally on the 478 after they had been erased and reset on the unit. This was long before BaseCamp had it's present category support. The categories in question were the ones initially on the 478 and no amount of deletion/resetting on the unit had any effect in subsequent transfers. The 478 (two of them) always had their categories reset to match that original download. I could find no evidence in any BaseCamp file of a category reference. I finally accepted the inference from a previous Garmin developer that I might have been hallucinating. I still believe there's more to it than that. :)