"The given key is not in the dictionary": what on earth does that mean?????????

Question

Started a new project and this is the error message I get when it tries to convert a file to translatable format. The error message means absolutely nothing to me!

Paul · Answer

Hello Alexander, 
 It could mean anything depending on what resources you are using for your project, or maybe even the type of files you are handling. If you could provide a little more information we might be able to suggest a solution: 
 
 what version of Studio are you using? 
 are you connecting to any servers? 
 what filetypes are you handling (also the version if you know)? 
 when in your creation process is this error thrown? 
 do you have the error stack? This is the detail behind the error message which you can find by clicking on the little symbols in the error message. 
 
 Thanks

Paul · Answer

Thanks Alexander, 
 Based on your subsequent message it seems there is something in the 2010 filetype that Studio doesn't like, so it would make sense to investigate what that might be if we were to find the problem to this error. If you can share the file I'd be happy to investigate it? 
 Unknown said: I wish there was a glossary to explain what the message means! 
 Here's the problem with this. This error means the code is referring to an attribute that doesn't exist or doesn't have a value. That in itself, as you can imagine, tells us nothing because it could still be something affecting anywhere in the code. Would knowing this help you? Probably not, and it doesn't help us either, as this information on its own is not enough to help find the resolution to where this is, hence the need for more information. Debugging can be quite tricky and the number of different scenarios possible in a filetype is huge, so we can never test them all! All we can do is narrow down the file until we get to the very thing that is causing the error and then we can fix it. 
 Regards 
 Paul

Paul · Answer

Hi Alexander, 
 
You can send it to pfilkin@sdl.com 
 
Thank you 
 
Paul

Andreas Galambos · Answer

Although this is an older thread, we came across this issue once again today and the cause are the infamous "content controls" of Word 2010, in this specific case: check boxes. These do have an index but no title value and their Range.Text is ?, in case this helps with the remedy. 
 
We are currently working around this issue by saving down to a lower format, e.g. .doc. alas, this converts the content controls to static objects, meaning the checkboxes lose their functionality, and we have to copy over the original checkboxes into the translated document saved to .docx afterwards. 
 
So: not exactly a comfortable workaround.

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"The given key is not in the dictionary": what on earth does that mean?????????