At 10:00 PM -0700 5/18/02, Robin Becker wrote:
Provided some telephone help to a friend that was trying to update to the
latest version today. Had trouble getting the decoder list to come out
right. Eventually had him delete the decoder index in the Prefs folder,
then create a new index which solved the problem. Maybe including an empty
Prefs folder index file as part of the update package, along with some code
in the app that automatically creates a new index when the index is empty?
That's a good idea. I played with it some last week, but wasn't able to make it really reliable. I'll keep working on it. (The problem is that the index can be in two places: The xml/ directory, where the distributed index lies, or the prefs/ directory, where you can make your own. But only one is used, so they can get out of sync with each other)
Another thing that came up had to do with the roster. Some of the entries
there were from earlier playing around. I talked him through a manual edit
of the roster file, which solved that problem also but a typo during the
edit caused some extra grief. Any plans to incorporate roster management?
Also there were many old versions of the index and roster files around so I
wondered if anything is planned in the way of file maintenance?
I added a Roster menu to help with some of this. It lets you delete an entry, including the associated file, export and import entries to separate files, and copy an entry into a new one.
In each case, the old file is backed-up by renaming it, then leaving it in the directory. The new name has the "xml" on the end replaced with a bunch of digits (to make it unique). I guess those files will start to build up over time, so I should probably add a way to clean them up....
After getting everything ironed out, the app had no problem talking to the
NCE system. However after successfully reading the loco data and saving it
to disk, the NCE was still held in some kind of programming command mode.
Don't know if shutting down the app would have fixed this, but I heard that
turning off the PC did release the NCE.
I've tried to recreate this without success, sorry. Next time it happens, could you do a test for me? Open a new programmer (you don't have to restart the program first) and push the "ident decoder" button. If that fixes it (command station goes back to normal), I think it likely that a message got lost between the program and the command station. If that _doesn't_ fix it, there's probably something inconsistent in the program.
Bob
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Bob Jacobsen (Bob_Jacobsen@..., 510-486-7355, fax 510-495-2957)
Bob Jacobsen