User’s Guide – FileFixer for V8

Chapter 16 — Tips

About yesterday’s backup...

Probably the most common method of “repairing” design files in use in the world today is deleting the damaged file and reloading yesterday’s backup.

The most obvious problem with this “technique” is that you can lose up to a full day’s worth of work. Considering the cost of a day’s worth of operator and workstation time, clearly this should be a last resort.

But there is a more important reason for not going back to yesterday’s backup. The error that caused your file to become corrupted today might be dormant in yesterday’s backup. The safest solution is to analyze misbehaving or crashed design files with FileFixer and fully repair them.

Using FileFixer with Design File History

FileFixer’s “Automatic Design File Repair” processing typically adds, modifies or deletes elements in a design file being processed. If you activated Design History for a file, FileFixer’s changes will be recorded in the file’s history.

If you attempt to use FileFixer to repair a file that has uncommitted changes created by another user, you will encounter a dialog box similar to the following:

Screen Shot 2022 05 16 at 6.40.00 PM -

FileFixer’s “Search for Problems” mode also generates a “Design file settings” change event when a seal-of-approval is created or updated. Creation of a seal-of-approval can be disabled by selecting Settings | Change Settings | General... | Write seal-of-approval information to the design file.

V7 files

FileFixer for V8 is designed to process V8 format design files and cell libraries.

If FileFixer fails to handle an error

When an element contains more than one error, FileFixer will report the error that it considers the most serious.

One error may be obscured by another error FileFixer considers more serious. Therefore, if FileFixer fails to fix a certain problem, try running FileFixer again on the fixed file. An error that was obscured the first time through may become fixable after more serious problems are corrected.

Controlling the types of errors which are reported

Sometimes you may not want FileFixer to report all the problems it finds.

For example, say you receive a design file from a contractor but he didn’t send the font resource file he used. Well, if you don’t have a font resource file with that font number, FileFixer will report the missing font for each text element in every file. Since you know about this problem (and will receive the font resource file from the contractor soon) you can turn off Search Setting Text | Text element uses non-existent font (error 144) so that FileFixer doesn’t report the missing font. This will simplify the report output so you can immediately see the remaining problems that need to be addressed.

You can also control the severity of errors being reported, using Settings | Change Settings... | Search | Design File | Severity of errors to be reported.

Our commitment

You should never be satisfied with less than 100% perfect performance from this product. If you find any files that FileFixer cannot diagnose and/or repair or if FileFixer reports something that doesn’t appear to be an error, send the file along with a description of the problem to us. We will do our best to find out what is wrong with your file and modify FileFixer to handle that problem in the future.

If you find so much as a comma out of place with this product or its documentation, we are interested.

Contact Axiom Support at support@AxiomInt.com to obtain instructions for uploading problem files to our ftp site.

All files must be submitted with a report that explains exactly what operational difficulty you are having with the file(s) in question and everything that needs to be done for us to reproduce the difficulty. We can analyze and remedy only those problems we can reproduce.

If you encounter errors not covered in this manual, send a detailed email to support@AxiomInt.com. Please include as much information about your operating system, the problem that you are experiencing and exactly what you did when this problem occurred. Also make sure to include the version number of MicroStation and FileFixer that you are running.