Secondary legislation: PDF fails to generate or document fails registration after change to Dates

Issue description

A number of secondary legislation users have reported that, after editing dates in the dates block on the front page of their document, they are:

• Unable to generate a PDF; and / or

• Unable to register the document, receiving a message like: ‘Unable to extract metadata. The document failed to validate against the Akoma Ntoso schema.’

If you have recently updated the dates block to change one or more dates (but not all of the dates) then this may have caused a problem with the metadata associated with the dates.

For example, if you have edited the dates block to change the Made and Laid dates, but not the Coming into force date, this may have caused an issue with the metadata for the Coming into force date.

NB: either of the above issues could also be caused by different problems. If the guidance on this page doesn’t fix the issue, please contact Lawmaker Support.

Workaround

To fix this issue, please do the following:

1. Open the Update Dates window by clicking on the Dates Block (i.e., the blue area underneath the title, containing the dates);

2. Click the edit button next to the first date, i.e. the pencil icon;

3. In the new window, select the Date and in the calendar, reselect the desired date (which will presumably be the same as the date already in the field);

4. Click Update;

5. Repeat steps 2.-4. for all of the dates in the window;

6. Click Save.

Please then attempt to generate a PDF (through Document > Generate PDF) to check this is working. Then, reattempt to submit the document.

Please note that if you have to change the dates subsequent to this fix, you should update all the dates using the steps provided.

Details