Incomplete ways are discarded without notice - untested for server loads

[anonymous]

When a node of a way is missing in an .osm file JOSM discards the way silently without informing the user about that fact.

[RussNelson]

I've verified that this does indeed happen.

[anonymous]

src/org/openstreetmap/josm/io/OsmReader.java has a function called createWays(), which very clearly skips ways with missing nodes. The question is: what to do about it? And, how many other ways are there to break a .osm file's data coherency that JOSM is currently silently discarding? How was this problem discovered? Did somebody edit the .osm file themselves, or is there some software out there which writes out incoherent .osm files?

[RussNelson]

Previous comment was mine also. I've been thinking about what is the right thing to do, to recover the maximum information: when a way contains a node which is not in the file, create a node a little ways away from the previous node (or in the center of the view if it's the first node), and assign the node a special attribute like "Created_by=JOSM missing node". If any nodes had to be created, then the loader should pop up an error message saying "File incomplete; search for `missing node to find the re-created nodes."

[RussNelson]

Fixed. Sent a patch to the mailing list because it won't let me upload it as a file.

[stoecker]

Patch to fix for file loading included. Must be tested for server downloads as well.

[Gubaer]

For an incomplete primitive (node, way or relation) in JOSM only its type and its id should be known. An incomplete primitive is typically returned by the API for relation memembers.

Several API calls also return ways with incomplete nodes and JOSM now supports incomplete ways with incomplete nodes. trunk/src/org/openstreetmap/josm/io/OsmReader.java​ has been updated accordingly.