Menus exist in CUI and workspace, but refuse to display.

[jguest82179]

OK, I thought I was getting my head around the new CUI reasonably well and I still think that it has great potential even if the implementation was particularly clumsy this time around, however I am obviously still having some issues.

My current problem is this: I have created a couple of new pull down menus using the CUI and after some initial teething problems they were working great. I went back in yesterday to add a few more items to the same menus and now they are refusing to display (the whole menus, not just the additions) when I exit the CUI and return to AutoCAD.

Everything else looks fine, they are exactly where they should be in the workspace etc. and they were the only things I changed. I am not getting any error messages at all, but they are simply not displaying.

Does anyone have any suggestions? :banghead:

[Gary.Orr]

While I do not have an answer to your post, I do believe that I can shed some light on the issue from a similar problem that I have encountered.

My issue was: The workspace showed my pulldown menus in the desired order, but were not actually appearing that way when closing the customize dialog.

What I found was a conflict between the CUI file and the ...\Profiles\<current profile>\Menus section of the registry. The CUI file showed the menu in the fourth position, while the Registry was indicating that it was last.

The registry setting was dominant.

My investigation continues.

[robert.1.hall72202]

The registry dominance makes some sense. So what you are implying here is that the CUI isn't making the correct changes to the system registry upon user customizations?
Wouldn't surprise me.

[Gary.Orr]

Not just implying... I've just put toolbar settings (visibility and location) to the test as well. Same result.

My helpdesk time is about to take a drastic upswing.

Gary

[jguest82179]

What I found was a conflict between the CUI file and the ...\Profiles\<current profile>\Menus section of the registry.

The CUI file showed the menu in the fourth position, while the Registry was indicating that it was last.

The registry setting was dominant.

Where exactly in the registry are you referring to, Gary? I have had a look but I can't seem to pinpoint the info that you are referring to.

Also, my problems have grown significatly since my first post!

Since ACAD Mech was refusing display my customizations I loaded the custom.cui file that I had created which (I thought) only included these two extra pull down menus into Building systems. Here they displayed perfectly (after getting through the issues of an ACAD Mech workspace trying to be inplemented in Building Systems - Oops! Not pretty!) and also allowed me to continue with some further customisations.

Now I come back to it a couple of days later and find that whilst the new pull downs still display in Building Systems, I can no longer make any changes or additions to them as the 'Custom.cui' is now apparently Read-Only!!

Now as far as I know I have not done anything to make this the case, and all of the other settings that I could think of to check indicate that this should not be the case, but nonetheless it remains Read-Only and refuses to budge. GRRR!! :banghead:

[Steve_Bennett]

Now I come back to it a couple of days later and find that whilst the new pull downs still display in Building Systems, I can no longer make any changes or additions to them as the 'Custom.cui' is now apparently Read-Only!!

Now as far as I know I have not done anything to make this the case, and all of the other settings that I could think of to check indicate that this should not be the case, but nonetheless it remains Read-Only and refuses to budge. GRRR!! :banghead:Try specifiying in options which CUI file is to be used as enterprise & main & hopefully it will allow you to edit it after this.

[jguest82179]

Try specifiying in options which CUI file is to be used as enterprise & main & hopefully it will allow you to edit it after this.

Thanks Steve, but I don't think that's the problem.

My "Custom.cui" is the main customization file, and my "Acadm.cui" is the Enterprise customization file - as per the instructions in other threads here.

As I said, everything worked fine for a week or so and then it appears to have simply stopped working. Now I know that this doesn't make any logical sense, but I'm sure that I haven't changed anything to make this happen so I am at a complete loss as to what went wrong here. :-(

[robert.1.hall72202]

I am having a similar issue where I cannot reorder the menus............the windows and help menus have somehow snuck into the middle of the row.

[Gary.Orr]

Sorry for the delay in responding... The area of the registry that is causing the conflict is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R16.2\ACAD-4001:409\Profiles\<<Unnamed Profile>>\Menus

Variables in this string include:
ACAD-4001:409 will be different depending on the version of AutoCAD that you have;
<<Unnamed Profile>> will be the name of the profile that you are working on.

The "POPx" values are the order of your visible pulldown menus with POP1 being the first menu item and continuing upward through... (I forget what the max is).

These values are stored as part of the user's profile (and can be shared via importing and exporting) between users. (Sorry if I'm wasting your time with things that you already know, but that knowledge is important to understanding the mess.)

If your workspace indicates that menu "X" should be the fourth item while the profile in the registry indicates that menu "X" is POP6, the menu item will appear as the sixth item.

AutoDesk always includes a strong caution about editing the registry, yet they constantly force us to go there to fix these kinds of issues.

I'm continuing my research into this and hope to develop a programatic solution until AutoDesk discovers and fixes this bug (Oops, did I say that word?)

Good luck and let us know what you find.

Gary

[jguest82179]

OK, well I know it's been a while, but I've been busy and it slipped my mind to post the answer to my problem here even though I found it (with help) some time back. Sorry to anyone who's been hanging out for the answer.

The first part of my problem, that of the menus refusing to display, was never actually resolved - I simply wrote it off as either my stuff-up and part of the learning curve or simply yet another bug in the CUI.

The second part of my problem, that of the CUI going into 'Read-Only' mode, I discovered was definitely due to my inexperience with the CUI - I wasn't aware that Workspaces and other information were included in the "custom.cui" file, and as such it cannot me loaded directly into another AutoCAD, especially one that has another vertical application sitting on top of it. e.g. Loading a "Custom.cui" that was made in ACAD Mech into ACAD Elec is definitely a No-No! That is what the "Transfer" tab in the CUI is for - and it works quite well I must add.

However - there has become a third part to my problem just this morning, and I'm quite sure that it is closely related to the first part. Here it is:

I've been happily using the CUI now for a while, and after reading a number of discussions here on AUGI and elsewhere I thought I had it to a point where I was happy with it.

Then today I go to add some items to my pull down menus and everything looks perfect within the CUI, I click OK and it does its little rebuild of the menus etc. and I go to my pull down and nothing has changed.

"Oh, darn, I must have hit 'Cancel' instead of 'OK', that was silly - now I'll have to do it again."

So I goes and does it all over again, being very careful to first select 'Apply' and then 'OK' and then I go and check my pull down - NOTHING!! :banghead:

Now I KNOW that I have not changed anything that should have any effect on this since performing EXACTLY the same task yesterday with no problems whatsoever, so if somebody can come up with a logical explanation to this then I will not only be grateful, but extremely surprised.

[RobertB]

That sort of question is tough to answer without seeing the cui itself. Can you zip it up and post it?

[jguest82179]

OK, well now I am really confused.

I had already tried shutting AutoCAD down and restarting it, but to no avail. However when I restarted it again this morning the chahges that I made last week to the menus have finally decided to appear.

Note that I have NOT rebooted my machine in the meantime.

It is this sort of inconsistency with the CUI which I find to be incredibly annoying and disappointing, I really think it would have been best left until the next release AFTER the bugs were ironed out!

Robert - if it plays up again I will post the file for you to have a look at.

Thanks,...Jon.

[Ferroequine]

No logical explanation, but I've had that happen too. I've learned to keep an extra backup copy of the CUI around before going "modding", just in case it does random stuff like what you're experiencing.

[jguest82179]

I've learned to keep an extra backup copy of the CUI around before going "modding"

Very smart move, I think. If only I'd done the same myself. :(

I have discovered one thing that can make this situation arise, however this was not the reason for last weeks episode.

If you delete a command from the command list without first removing every instance of it from your menus (and probably toolbars too, I imagine, but I hadn't put it into any toolbars) then you will end up with a corrupted CUI file which gives you the error:

"An Unhandled exception has occurred in a component in your application. Click
continue and application will ignore this error and attempt to continue.

Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

Also, I have noticed that since this latest error has occured my workspace has gone missing from my CUI. Add to that the fact that not only have my custom POP menus disappeared, but all of the standard AutoCAD POP menus have also disappeared except File, View, Window, and Help. I think that this means that the "ACAD.cui" is not loading either.

Now one could probably be forgiven for thinking that the fix for this situation might be to go into the CUI and remove the offending orphaned commands from their menu locations, however any and all attempts to do this result in the error message quoted above. The only way that I can see so far is to directly edit the CUI file with an XML Editor, however this requires at least a basic knowledge of the XML structure and conventions which I do not have.

My question now is:

Why does the CUI allow you to delete a command that is used in a menu if it is going to cause these sorts of errors? Why couldn't a simple warning message such as "Please remove all instances of this commands' use before deleting" be given when somebody attempts to do such a thing. Or better still - delete all instances for you but precede it with the warning "This will delete all instances of this command in all Menus, Sub-Menus, and Toolbars. Continue? Y/N"

It was a simple mistake on my part - I actually thought of the possibility that this action might cause an error so I went through and removed all instances that I could find. Obviously I missed a few, so now my cui file is apparently useless to me. :banghead:

[jguest82179]

OK, feeling a little silly but not too much so. Still much more frustrated than silly.

I've just managed to find a fix to the problem described in my last post. It was pretty easy, it just didn't occur to me straight away.

If you find yourself in the situation that I have described above, with orphaned commands used in your POP menus and causing the corruption and failure to load of your CUI files then you must delete the entire Menu or Sub-Menu that contains the orphaned command. (You only need to go one level up though, not the whole menu tree.)

Now apply these changes. If your menus do not return then you may need to rebuild your workspace, depending on how bad the damage was in the first place. My workspace actually disappeared from my cui file so I definitely had to rebuild mine, but this did not happen straight away.

It seems to me that if you do sustain a minor injury to the cui that unless it is found and treated as soon as possible that it will begin to crumble and then take on a snowball effect, gathering momentum until it reaches the bottom of the slope resulting in a complete collapse of your customizations.

[tsbykatherine60220]

OK, I thought I was getting my head around the new CUI reasonably well and I still think that it has great potential even if the implementation was particularly clumsy this time around, however I am obviously still having some issues.

My current problem is this: I have created a couple of new pull down menus using the CUI and after some initial teething problems they were working great. I went back in yesterday to add a few more items to the same menus and now they are refusing to display (the whole menus, not just the additions) when I exit the CUI and return to AutoCAD.

Everything else looks fine, they are exactly where they should be in the workspace etc. and they were the only things I changed. I am not getting any error messages at all, but they are simply not displaying.

Does anyone have any suggestions? :banghead:
Did you ever resolve this particular issue. I'm running into the same situation here with our electrical department's CUIs.

I've added the Electrical Common.CUI as the enterprise CUI and in the Main CUI I've added an Electrical Default workspace showing all of the electrical pulldown menus.

Apply, OK, all looks good! Save the workspace again just to be safe, start Acad over and their gone. If I have the workspace settings to "save changes as you go" I have to go back into the CUI editor to fix the problem. If I have the workspace settings to "don't save changes", I only need to set the Electrical Default current again (even though it says it's current already) and I'm good to go.

I ended up adding (command "_wscurrent" "electrical default") to the electrical acad.lsp file as a work around but no one can make their own customizations without suffering the same loss of menus.

Help!!!!

Rick

[jguest82179]

Hi Rick,

I think that you may have a slightly different, but related problem. Unfortunately I cannot tell you exactly what it is, but it doesn't sound like quite the same thing as I was experiencing. The best that I can figure out with my problem is that somehow my CUI file actually got corrupted and because of this refused to display.

It's very difficult to know for sure when the CUI gives no feedback whatsoever to the user when a problem arises. The only error message that I have seen so far in regard to the CUI was when a corruption occurred in the XML based CUI file and even then the error message came from the operating system and not from the CUI. It may have been a good idea for Autodesk to build some sort of error handling into their code like any other programmer would have done.

I never did find a useful solution to the original problem from the first post in this thread, the best I could manage was a workaround. I can only assume that the problem was some form of corruption of the CUI file, but because the CUI simply fails rather than giving an indication of what the problem is I had no way of fixing the problem.

The way that I fixed it was to start again with a blank 'Custom.cui' file and use the Transfer tab in the cui to copy the necessary items that I knew were working correctly from the corrupt CUI file into the new blank CUI file. This does work, but the fact remains that we simply shouldn't have to do it!

[Kioti]

I was having similar problems with my menu and toolbar displaying while I was doing my changing and using the ACAD.CUI as by main customization file.
I did a save as of the ACAD.CUI and renamed it something with out ACAD in the name and then did my changes and assigned my own work space applied the changes then made sure to save the current file and my problem went away.
I find that having used AutoCAD since release 1.4 has caused me to try more "off the wall" things when converting to new upgrades.

I hope this helps with some of your problems

MGregg
CAD Sys Manager
Flatlands of South Dakota