Menus badly scrambled

[terrypin]

I make great use of menu macros. (For example, a middle click on the title of any of 60 applications displays a menu of many macros to work specifically within that app.) So I was dismayed to find that about a quarter of these menus have somehow become corrupted. Many of the macros within them are not scoped to that app, and - less important - their alphabetc sequence has been lost. It's rather like all menus were tipped into a bag, shaken up, and then replaced randomly.

 

I'm stepping through old backup files (extension .~mex) but it's going to be a hard job to fix.

 

If anyone else does use menus, I'd appreciate it if you could check for similar corruption please.

 

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While engaged on this I was surprised to find long gaps in the dates of these backup files. How do yours look?

 

 

[acantor]

I made extensive use of menus until my work changed about three years ago. I haven't found a need for menus since.

 

Rarely, the menus got slightly out of order. I never understood why, but because it happened so infrequently, I assumed the source of the problem was "pilot error."

 

I didn't reorder the menus by restoring a previous version from backup. Instead, I spent the time to manually fix the menus.

 

Maybe we should set a challenge to script macros to simplify the task of reordering menus!

[rberq]

I use just a few small menus.  ME Pro 4.9.  I haven't seen any problem, but I might not even notice.  A challenge sounds like fun -- I would get to reuse the bubble sort logic that I just wrote for displaying active processes.  😛

[terrypin]

Thanks both. Note that it’s not the re-ordering but the unscrambling that’s the major pain. (And I have a macro that re-assigns the hotkeys, once they have been manually restored to the preferred alphabetic order, which I use after a editing the contents.)

 

But as an example of the ‘scrambling’, my menu of about 30 macros for IrfanView is now sprinkled with macros for other applications like Excel, Google Earth and Explorer!

 

What about my second question re the frequency of your .~mex backup files? I backup all my stuff nightly (and weekly) anyway, but I’d like to be sure those automated ones are behaving properly.

[rberq]

1 hour ago, terrypin said:

While engaged on this I was surprised to find long gaps in the dates of these backup files. How do yours look?

 

I had the option set to back up whenever the Editor closed, and it was backing up every time I closed out of editing a macro.  That was excessive.  Changed the preference to back up when ME itself closed.  That was not often enough, so now if I want a backup I do Ctrl-Alt-0 to run a macro that does a Restart ME command.  Only takes a few seconds.  Incidentally, with ME Pro the Restart resulted in lots of faults/abends, until I inserted a line to wait for file-ready for the log file, and removed the Macro Return command following the Restart.  Help screens say that Restart should be the very last command within the macro.   

[Cory]

I only have one menu that I would remember the order on, and mine seems fine. 

 

I do remember long ago an issue where they would get disorganized, but I can't remember any details. Maybe check the forum and see if you can find it. Maybe there's some answers there. 

 

Did you make any recent changes? What version are you using? Did you recently update MEP? Rhetorical. Just some things to consider. 

 

If you don't have a recent MEP backup, look to your regular backups. I like keeping my MEX files in a cloud synchronize folder which also gives me easy access to previous versions. Also nice because every change is  immediately backed up. But I also have an online backup and external hard drive backup that fires daily. I'm sure you must have something similar. 

 

Also check to see if you have a previous version in Windows 10. Just right click the folder. 

[terrypin]

Thanks, those both came in as my latest was going out!

 

I’m stepping back through successively older backups and comparing carefully. It’s tricky because I frequently make menu changes and this latest issue could turn out to be down to be at least some carelessness on my part.

 

Dropbox is my cloud resource.

[rberq]

2 minutes ago, terrypin said:

as an example of the scrambling, my menu of about 30 macros for IrfanView is now sprinkled with macros for other applications like Excel, Google Earth and Explorer!

 

Ouch.  You really did mean ALL the menus were dumped at once into the one bag and scrambled together.  Sounds to me like a macro file corruption -- did your macro file recently get auto-converted from one ME version to the next, like from 4 to 6?

[terrypin]

43 minutes ago, rberq said:

 

Ouch.  You really did mean ALL the menus were dumped at once into the one bag and scrambled together.  Sounds to me like a macro file corruption -- did your macro file recently get auto-converted from one ME version to the next, like from 4 to 6?

 

No changes to version or any other relevant significant activity. (Apart from a Win 10 update the other night, an event I'm always nervous about.)

 

This is Macro Express Pro 6.1.3.1 and Win 10 Pro is Version 1909 (OS Build 18363.1016).