Some laws have no identifiers—now what?

[waldoj]

The solution to #29 highlighted that there are some really weird laws out there, in terms of their XML. For instance, § 54.1-3040.5 has a weird header. Normally a law's header looks like this:

<anchor id="_1-2" />
<heading>
   <desig>§ 1-2.</desig>
   <title>Effective date of Code</title>
</heading>

But § 54.1-3040.5 looks like this:

<heading>
   <title>§ 54.1-3040.5. (Contingent effective date -- see note) Additional authorities invested in party state licensing boards</title>
</heading>

So we have no desig, no id, the result of which is that we're inserting a law with no identifier whatsoever.

Further, instead of having the text contained within <level levelType="section">, it is within <level levelType="hierarchy-note">

This import is still underway, but there are already 144 sections without any identifier.

This is tough to solve, because there is no desig. We can't use the identifier in title, because every other law includes no identifier in the title field. This might just need to be chalked up to an upstream problem that we cannot deal with—it is up to Lexis-Nexis to fix it.

[krusynth]

I solve this at the State class level on American Legal, as every section appears with the section number and title as one field.