ERRORS.md

Having problems?

Here's a running list of common and uncommon errors to help you build transformers.

ERROR: AttributeError AttributeError: is_valid is unknown. Are all of its attributes available?

WHAT IT MEANS: The is_valid function can't find the attributes based on the field it's checking. Check if you've set the correct field. For example, perhaps your map contains full_name and the is_valid function is checking for last_name.

ERROR: KeyError

line 59, in person
    'gender': self.gender_map[self.gender.strip()]
KeyError: u'F'

in race
    'name': self.race_map[self.nationality.strip()]
KeyError: u''

WHAT IT MEANS: Your function doesn't understand the map you've provided. In the first error example, the person function isn't finding the right key to map 'gender' — i.e. it can't interpret 'F'. Check gender_map, and make sure you've provided the right key information.

In the second example, the user provided a race_map that was incomplete — it did not account for blank or '' entries. The solution was to add another entry to race_map for blank entries:

race_map = {
        'AMIND': 'American Indian',
        'WHITE': 'White',
        'HISPA': 'Hispanic',
        'ASIAN': 'Asian',
        '2+RACE': 'Mixed Race',
        'PACIF': 'Pacific Islander',
        'BLACK': 'Black',
        '': 'Not given',
    }

ERROR: SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file /.../transformer.py on line 24, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

WHAT IT MEANS: You have a weird typo. Maybe something like – ? Delete that.

ERROR: ValueError: An employee was hired after the data was provided. Is DATE_PROVIDED correct?

WHAT IT MEANS: Someone in your data has a hire date AFTER the date you obtained the data. First, check with the entity that this information is correct. If it is, and that person just hasn't started working yet, you'll need to include a function to ignore them.

Add this function:

    def calculate_tenure(self):
        hire_date_data = map(int, self.hire_date.split('-'))
        hire_date = date(hire_date_data[0], hire_date_data[1],
                         hire_date_data[2])
        tenure = float((self.DATE_PROVIDED - hire_date).days) / float(360)
        if tenure < 0:
            tenure = 0
        return tenure

ERROR: ImportError: No module named django_extensions

What it means: You need to update your requirements.

RUN: pip install -r requirements/local.txt