Wildfire 5 mapkeys

[qnen]

We are just getting going on WF5. We are trying to get our start part mapkeys working. The mapkeys do alot of things during the part creation (run a custom user interface to load parameters, generate a mapkey to load parameters, perform some drawing maintenance, etc). I am having trouble with the mapkey crashing at various points. I've added "Pause" commands in the mapkey at certain points and this seems to make things more stable.

What I am wondering is if anyone has had similar issues or has some guidelines for improving the robustness of complex mapkeys.

Thanks

Michael Kuehnen, Kansas City

 

[looslib]

Are these mapkeys created in WF5 or in an earlier version of Wildfire?
I think there is a utility that will update a mapkey from one version to a newer version. You may try to run that on your mapkeys.

With the menu chnages in WF5 drafting, I would suspect that some mapkeys would fail as the menu option is no longer there.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[mjcole]

Michael K. ,

Suggestion: Make a list of all the functions/dialogs used by your mapkeys.
You can even create test mapkeys like z01, z02, z03 or i01 02 03 etc for icons and save them to a 00test.mapkey.pro file and use tools options to load them in.
Then you can test each one out by double clicking it's name in the Mapkey dialog which has been the same for 10 years and could use some useability work Don't you just love it when it scrols back to the top all the time and you can't type a letter to jump to a location in the list. PTC shoulda hired me when I interviewed for a Product Definition job (I guess my writing skills weren't up to the task)

If you keep changing your user interface, hopefully no one will notice it's flaws.

An easy way to do this is run them on your earlier Wildfire WF4 or WF3 where the UI was basically the same. Then you can manually check the functions that are new in Wildfire 5. Majority of changes were moving the File Properties and Parameter info off the SetUp menu and onto the File Properties menu which may be harder to mapkeys. If your mapkeys use the Tools > Relations or Parameters menus it might be easier.

Or yeah just call PTC tech support and have them serve you like a butler which is their job for forcing you to pay maintenance.

Old Trailfiles will work in most later versions and there are even run codes that tell Pro/E how to interpret the old commands as new ones. You probably don't use many trailfiles but some of the forum members that know more about them. I used to work at PTC and know way too much about trailfiles but I once was able to recover someones part after they used Pro/E for 3 hours without saving their part.

If Pro/E crashes you can search for the last Save command in trailfile.txt.number modify file to strip earlier commands between open and last save then save as .txt with no .## extension and run it from Play Trailfile menu item on your Tools Menu. You probably use mapkeys cause they can be iconized and added to custom flyouts.

Michael

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