Issues with metadata file in Diversty analysis

I am working through the moving pictures tutorial and doing Alpha and beta diversity analysis. I the step for qiime diversity alpha-group-significance I got an error code related to the metadata file that I have never had before. Which is the following
Plugin error from diversity:

Metadata does not contain any columns that satisfy this visualizer's requirements. There must be at least one metadata column that contains categorical data, isn't empty, doesn't consist of unique values, and doesn't consist of exactly one value.

this is the same metadata I've the whole time and was able to create a Alpha Rarefaction plot with before. Any idea what the error code actually means or what needs to be changed in the metadata.

Hello @hmarti, without seeing your metadata it is difficult to pin down exactly what is going on, but that error is saying that your metadata needs to have at least one categorical column meeting the following criteria:

  1. It cannot be empty
  2. It cannot have all unique values
  3. It must not contain only one value

We most often see this issue when the metadata does not contain any categorical columns at all, but it could also be the case that you have categorical columns that do not meet the above criteria.

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Hi @Oddant1, when I compare my metadata to the sample metadata they look the same. There are the standard columns if sampleID, Barcode Sequence, LinkerPrimerSequence, location, and description. I tried running a different command and its error code was:
All values in the grouping vector are the same. This method cannot operate on a grouping vector with only a single group of objects (e.g., there are no 'between' distances because there is only a single group).

I was grouping by location, were there are samples coming for both the same and different locations.

Hmmm. Can you DM me your artifact, your metadata, and the exact command you ran? I will try to reproduce the issue and see if I can figure out what's happening because that does sound like it should work.

For posterity, the issue was that while there are samples in the metadata with differing values in their categorical columns the samples present in the data all have the same values in their metadata.

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