[XML export] export 7sus(4) chord to MusicXML fails reimport: "Element degree contains unknown attribute text."

btw, happens on i686 linux nightly 390fb29 and x86-64 windows nightly d2dda16

Thanks for clarifying. I should mention rarely do jazz musicians put write "G7sus4" and instead only write "G7sus" because is optimized for common case of sus4.

Thanks for sharing. I've skimmed quickly over that without studying carefully. It seems the last thing Michael Good says :

If you put the entire chord symbol text in the kind element, you must also set the text attribute on the degree elements to an empty string. Otherwise you will likely get degrees being appended to your kind symbol, and that will be the fault of the export, not the import.

And that seems to be why you changed that degree text to the empty string"". But looking at Michael's example , he has the degree-value's text attribute and the degree-type's text attribute equal to empty strings, but actually does not have a text attribute for the parent degree. So maybe you just had a misreading of when he wrote "degree elements" thinking that meant *the* degree element versus the elements *inside* the degree element (which is what I believe he meant).

Out of curiousity, if I import MuseScore's G7sus.xml into Finale NotePad 2012, I get error:

"XML error in file G7sus.xml at line 88: Attribute "text" must be declared for element type "degree"

If I completely remove the text attribute from degree from the xml file, or if I remove the text attribute from degree and instead put the empty text as attribute for degree-value and degree-type (attached here), then I'm able into import into NotePad as well as MuseScore. **

Anyway, so it seems that if setting degree text attribute to an empty string is what is causing the import on finale notepad and musescore to complain, so maybe should do what his example shows by having degree-value and degree-type get an empty string for text attribute instead of having a text attribute for the degree element.??? But again, I haven't studied all the issues involved...

**(although I'm making a note that NotePad import displays as "G 7" without the word sus, while MuseScore import changes the original G7sus into an explicit G7sus4 even though the kind text is only "7sus". As an aside, to me personally, I would consider the "kind" to be just "suspended" and not "suspended-fourth" if user hasn't explicitly specified it as "sus4" versus "sus2", even though sus4 is by far the most common and may have been the writer's intention...but again I haven't studied the code and specs, so I'm sure there is a valid motivation for storing it as "suspended-fourth"...but maybe musescore should just look at the text when importing so musescore gets identical import as export).

Marc, it seems you also realized you might have misinterpreted, as you wrote in https://musescore.org/en/node/114771#comment-516351

"But I think I might have misinterpreted Michael Good's advice - apparently he was actually suggesting a text attrtibute on the "degree-value" tag, not the "degree" tag. Does this seem reaosnable to people?"

Seems reasonable to me have the empty string as text attribute for "degree-value". (Would "degree-type" also have an empty string as text attribute, similar to Michael Good's example?)

When answering when to include text attribute and when not to,
Michael Good makes the distinction that :

With 9sus4 there is no 1-1 matching of text to semantics as represented by the children of the harmony element. So in this case you need text tags to guide the reading application

So even though the specs say the text attribute is not "Required" for degree-type or degree-value, however for chords that don't have 1-1 matching of text to semantics (like these sus chords), I think should make everything explicitly clear. Since we are already spelling out the degree in the text attribute string of the kind element for these sus chords, I say should also explicitly set empty string for both degree-type in addition to degree-value. That way some other program doesn't try to add some undesired degree-type text, thereby turning a "G7sus" into something meaningless like "G7susadd". Basically, it doesn't hurt to include the empty string, but it can only help.

I guess that PR will do it. But I find the name for the boolean "degreeText" confusing, because it doesn't reflect its meaning: if true it means write an empty string while if false it means don't write any text attribute at all. So, I think a better to name that boolean something along the lines of emptyStringDegreeText. In the future someone might want to extend that MusicXML export code to actually explicitly output non-empty strings if that boolean is false.

thanks, thats good.

I think you mean https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/3124 as the alternative PR. I like 3124 better than 3123.