Designer bug?

[mister_zed]

Hello, everybody!

Over the years I have gathered quite a lot of patterns in the favorites.mpn file. It is now quite big, probably too big for designer to handle. Size 188 MB.

Designer hangs on startup. It displays the banner, starts reading from disk and then hangs only consuming CPU. The # of bytes read before the hang is always 208631244.

If I remove the favorites file, designer starts Ok. But as soon as I try to import the favorites or if I put it back in place, designer won't work. Any ideas?

Regards /Z

[fwharris]

All caused by the large favorites list.

If you have the patterns save on your computer already reduce the size by deleting the patterns in your pattern list. Do this with in designer, right click and delete. If you do not have them saved then right click, export (pay attention to the export location) and then delete them.

You can also move the favorites.mpn file out of the carvewright folder location and when you restart designer it will create a new favorites list as if you just started.

[mister_zed]

Hello... :-)

The problem is that as soon as I try to look at the favorites list in designer it will hang. Some of the patterns were never saved as ptn files, created directly from greyscale bitmaps... Sigh... lots of work going down the drain..

[mister_zed]

Just to clarify... I cannot even open favorites, so I cannot export either...

[mister_zed]

Is there a maximum size for the favorites file?

[eelamb]

100Meg to 150 is the max size, Some system 100 is max others is 150meg.

[fwharris]

Sounds like a bit of a problem then. Not sure what a good work around is to be able to get access/open it so you can get some of the patterns cleared out. What ever you do DO NOT DOUBLE CLICK on the mpn file in the folder as it will generate a duplicate and make thing ever worse.

[mister_zed]

Hello again!

I was not very willing to lose many hours of categorizing patterns, so I decided to act like a very desperate individual and have a close look at the file. I mean close.

When doung it I realized that the problem was not in size of the file. It was a corruption in the internal category structure. Dolphins were a subcategory under animals, which themselves were a subcategory under dolphins. You get the picture? Designer was running round in a tight circle trying to figure out the dependencies. A small cleanup fixed the issue.

And here comes the technical stuff how I found the root problem. Probably not very understandable if you do not work with databases. I happen to make my living as database architect, so this was known territory... Here is what I did.

I started by making a work copy of the favorites.mpn file. I opened the file in Notepad ++, which is a nice tool to look at unknown files. The first line of the file had a text in it, saying it is a SQLite database. I am specialized in Oracle databases, but a database is just a database, which means familiar ground.

I found on the internet a tool called sqlitestudio 2.1.4, which is a program that can handle those databases.

I opened the favorites.mpn file as if it were a database and this worked!

The database contains 4 tables: category, item, regID and tag. Iput all the subcategories under category 1 by altering the column called Parent in the category table. I then committed the changes (this means I saved them back into the database). Then I was able to restore the favorites file in the original spot and it works.

[fwharris]

Well sure glad you knew what your doing :D and got your issue fixed.

[mister_zed]

I am HAPPY now! :p

[eelamb]

mister_zed, nice work and great information. I too work with sql databases, normally not the lite version but full SQL server. Like you I open files uisng notepad, but never even thought of opening the MPN to see who owns it. I will tuck this away for later use.

[mister_zed]

Hello, Eddie!
Nice to see I am not the only database freak in here... ;)

[eelamb]

I do not make my living in them like you, but I do have many servers running SQL databases. My main work is MS and Novell servers, and networks.