Problems after installing update

This first pic is on my desktop PC and this is the first I've used DO since it was updated a few days ago It's not even loading properly. I closed and reopened it with the same result.

The upgrade on my laptop doesn't seem to have any issues displaying; however, it is using a different theme.

When I went to get the screen capture for my Desktop PC I realized that for some reason, viewing my screen capture folder using my laptop is not using the expected image folder layout which should be sorting it in reverse order by date. I'm only getting the default folder format which sorts by filename.

Here's the folder format percentage:

Which you can see from the file filter that there are 195 images and 1 hidden file from the status bar certainly within the 80%.

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If you reboot the machine, is it working OK then, at least initially? If it is working, does the problem happen after a few hours, but then go away again after another reboot?

My first guess would be the process is running out of GDI handles, but that's less likely if it's something that starts happening straight away.

Hover over the format lock on the status bar and a tooltip will appearing with information on where the current format comes from. Could you take a screenshot of the tooltip?

First the desktop not displaying properly. It gets rebooted everyday just so you know. When I checked it post reboot everything was whacked out but I don't know why. I then did an sfc which was unable to load the corrupted file(s). I don't know if it has something to do with the install of DO I hadn't changed anything on that machine other than items that would tell me to update them or auto-update but there's been no new software added. Then I went through the DSIM sequence and that seemed to fix something but I though that was related to Apps which I haven't added any that I'm ever recall doing.

Anyway the Desktop is resolved.

OK, I got your capture on the laptop it's still not picking up the correct folder format. FYI I have been making some changes to the toolbars with this dark format as you couldn't see drive letters and I started adding the labels to the operations toolbar which brings up other questions. The width of the operations toolbar is much wider with the text than it needs to be. I changed the font from 9 to 8 and I went through each tile and reduced the physical length of the name and then I also checked the minimize menu width but not all tiles have this option, which I'm not even sure if it's doing what I think, only the ones that have a popout setting. When I search help for popout or minimize menu width there was nothing describing them. I also tried toolbar width too with no luck. How do you search on a combination of words so I don't get things that just have menu or width, etc. I tried double quotes but got nothing or I got results that had no relevant answers.

The Opus install would not touch system files. If they were corrupted, something must've been wrong on the machine. Have you checked your C:\ drive's SMART data in case the storage hardware is failing?

This seems like a separate question really, but the toolbar width will be due to one or more of the buttons on the toolbar requiring that width.

If you have any multi-function buttons (aka "three-buttons") on that toolbar, it could be that the left/right/middle click action of one of the buttons has a label which is wider than the main button's label. The main button's label is displayed most of the time, when the button isn't being clicked, but if you click the button it displayed the label for the individual left/right/middle-click action, which might be wider. The toolbar needs to be wide enough to fit those labels, but you can edit them to something smaller if you want.

It could also be something that's off the bottom of the toolbar, which we can't see in the screenshot, in ">>" overflow menu at the very bottom of the toolbar. The toolbar will size itself to fit everything on it, even if the window's current size means some things end up in the overflow menu. (Otherwise, when you resized the main window, the toolbar sizes would jump around chaotically.)

I have a SMART monitor on the desktop drives and everything looks fine. I hadn't seen the problem till I did that DO upgrade I guess it could just be coincidence.

The toolbar width doesn't consider menus or drop-down just 3-buttons? Because I got some buttons on a menu that are hellaciously long and that doesn't seem to affect the width but why would that be different?

Anything regarding picking up the wrong folder formats?

The width of a button that opens a menu isn't affected by the contents of the menu. (Those only affect the width of the menu when it opens.)

The width of a three-button is the maximum of the widths of the top-level button and the (up to) three sub-buttons.

See the folder formats FAQs, which describe how to work out that kind of thing. If you're still stuck, please post full details in a separate thread.

I did post the full details including the extra screen shot you requested,

Check if Preferences / Folders / Folder Behaviour / Enable Folder Content Type detection for... is turned on, and enabled for the type of drive.

If you're opening the Default Lister, make sure Preferences / Launching Opus / Default Lister / Ignore folder format of Default Lister is turned on.

Or, if you're opening a layout, select the layout under Preferences / Layouts and Styles / Layouts and make sure Ignore folder formats saved within this layout is on, otherwise the saved format may override the content type detection when the lister first opens.


If you're still stuck, please start a separate thread for that question, and post the relevant details into that thread so it is self contained.

There are at least three separate questions being discussed, interwoven, in this thread and it's already like trying to trace through spaghetti, and (especially given the subject) unlikely to be found by anyone else with the same problem in future.

I usually do only put one issue per thread it was only because both machines were upgraded and both had resultant problems.

So step 1 of your folder fix is to see if the Enable Folder Content Type Detection is on for the drive type. It's unchecked. I don't even know how that would happen I've never touched the setting and yet some folders are working and others are not? Seems like the wildcards are working but the others are not. I changed the setting so everything seems like it's working again. I wouldn't know how to chase this down but I will add this happened with another setting a few weeks back that somehow had gotten changed. Is it possible the update is overwriting settings?

Thanks

It's possible but shouldn't happen, and we don't have any similar reports.

I even checked the setting on my desktop because I copied the settings from my laptop the last time I had to rebuild the desktop and sure enough that setting was turned on. Just weird.

I thought we were done with this folder format display but no. It's picking up the correct format but the format is not displaying properly.

Here's the initial display of the folder. The filenames are the actual creation dates of the files. So it's sorting from low to high which is normal sort order. You can see the folder format it's pulling from is Images.

And these are the settings of the folder format.

This first one just to show what field is being sorted on the creation date.

This shows that the format is supposed to be displayed using reverse sorting so high to low which is not happening.

Also, back to yesterday. There is a problem that needs to be fixed. The wildcard formats shouldn't be applying if the checkbox to Enable Folder Content Type Detection is unchecked but they were.

If you go to details mode and turn on the creation date column (it's not on by default) does it actually match what the filenames show?

The default sort order for date columns is newest -> oldest (newest files at the top). If you reverse the order then the oldest files will be at the top which seems to be what you're seeing.

If you want to change the default sort order you can do so from Preferences / Display / Fields.

Yes the details match all except the very first file which if off by 1 day probably a EDT or EST issue. That sort oddity is probably why I've been confused by the sort at various times setting up formats I never really paid enough attention I just reversed my choice. I mean ASCII sets the sort order which you've overridden to reverse for your thinking. I hate to divert to much from the consensus settings because then there are assumptions made when we're trying to resolve an issue on both our parts that things work a certain way. But this I'm going to reverse these.

I did a search on sort order which didn't bring up the right section but took me back into the Folder Behavior which brought a few questions. If you want me to split all this up let me know

OK, here's another one of these settings that's been turned-off for Calculating Folder Sizes which I wouldn't turn off. Below that is a checkbox to Skip Junctions and Softlinks when determining folder size which I've checked then I go down a bit further and there's another Ignore Junctions and Softlinks checkbox when calculating folder size???? What's that one for?

Manual Sorting I presume is overriding what's been specified in the folder formats? I know I can re-sort on most formats unless there's some combination of field widths that prevents sorting which I really don't understand why that even happens, we don't need to get into that here I'm actually trying to read through another thread but these widths are confusing, and yet that option to sort manually is not checked either. But since it was unchecked I should be prevented from sorting? Yet in the very folder we're using as an example above I have gone from ascending to descending multiple times so I'm assuming like the wildcard formats working even though that switch was off to determine content this is a similar problem?

What a can of worms this has opened up. When you go into "fields" and you see all the fields that are reverse sorted by the arrow to the right you can just go down through an uncheck the box but you don't have to gain access or activate the change in function to the field by checking the box in front of the field which is the way most of the screens work. In those settings that checkbox at the front does what? It doesn't seem to control accessing the sort field nor does it seem to prevent the update to the sort field from being applied. Just not sure of the function.

Sorting dates in ASCII order is nonsensical. You would have 1-Dec before 1-Nov, for example. Same with size, sorting file sizes in ASCII order would give you 1000 before 500.

No because your not using a variable width field and you know what's where in your layout you don't just sort 8 characters in whatever order they appear you have to know where yyyy vs dd vs mm all sit. Regardless it is the ASCII table that determines the sort on a PC.

I don't understand what you're saying, sorry.

A cleaned-up version would probably read:

No, because you're not using a variable-width field. You know what's located where in your layout. You don't just sort 8 characters in whatever order they appear. You must know where yyyy vs dd vs mm all sit for determining the sort order.

Be that as it may, Jon's point is valid. You reference ASCII by way of saying

But that's irrelevant. A date column in DOpus is always a date column. I don't know of a feature in DOpus to tell it to sort the date in ASCII (alpha-numeric) order rather than date order.

Your lack of periods and the stream-of-consciousness manner in which you are writing is making it difficult to digest what you have written. Consider this single sentence.

That's quite a mouthful in a single sentence.

I can answer one thing for you...

The manual says, either due to the automatic option above, or when triggered manually via the GetSizes command for the second of the "skip" options. So, the first one is for automatically-calculated folder sizes and the second one is more global that not only applies to automatic but also manual GetSizes folder size calculations.

To get this information, I clicked on the blue circle with a question mark on the top-right while viewing the Folder Behavior portion of the Preferences window. That blue question mark is aware of which part of Preferences you are in and will take you to the correct section of the manual so you can read all about those settings.

ASCII or EBCIDIC are used on different machines but do the same thing. ASCII sets the values that equal each character. In ASCII if my recall is right 32 = blank, 33 = ! .... and it keeps going. https://www.asciitable.com/ You can see the order of the data this is what defines the bit pattern for each character and because of the bit pattern it determine how where a specific value appears in a sort.

EBCIDIC is similar but is typically used on mainframes and the bit patterns on ASCII are not identical so if you move data between the 2 systems it has to do a conversion to change the ASCII values to EBCIDIC or vice-versa. Otherwise if you ported a letter between the 2 systems without converting the data that ! point at the end of a sentence would end up being a "Start of Significance" which is probably not even used anymore but at one point was probably a print control character. It's because of these non-used EBCIDIC characters that the ASCII table could reuse numbers to mean new things and maybe at some point we go from ASCII to something else because it gets clogged up with old technology requirements at the time that are no longer used. Here you can see the two tables side by side and see the differences. http://ascii-table.com/ebcdic-table.php Without these tables you couldn't sort anything because the computer wouldn't have any clue what comes first.

If you really want to get into it you can actually create your own tables. There's probably not a whole lot of cause to do that these days except maybe in the scientific world where you have a very different set of characters. It's the same thing when you go from Enlgish to Brazilian, Farsi, etc each have their own set of tables which is why you are asked when you setup your computer what lanuguage you want to use which is related to what character you get when you push a key on your keyboard.

Your date field is a date field because somewhere just like in Excel or Access it got defined as a date field. That's a function of a high-level programming language. The low-level that is behind that says the date field starts in column 5 and ends 12 most likely giving you 8 characters to represent the date. But it also knows which 4 characters are the yyyy, and the 2 that are the mm and the 2 that are dd and if there are any seperators saved it would know that as well.

Because space was so tight when computers were developed no separators were saved and in fact that's the reason that in the year 2000 we had to go through and expand all the year fields to 4 positions. Those 2 bytes were so valuable and in those early days that the century was dropped assuming there would be some type of new technology before it became a problem. There was no thought of ever having to much storage or memory but that you would have enough to pull off what you needed to do.

Because it is a date field it's shown differently in Australia than it is in the US. Dates to us in the US are usually displayed as MM-DD-YYYY but to sort a date you must sort in the YYYYMMDD order to have it sort properly. I know you don't realize that's happening behind the scenes and you see it simply as a single field but I assure you there's no other way it can be sorted. It's because the date is defined so that each field is in a known location that allows you to display it differently in Australia which is DD-MM-YYYY I think. It's been a long time since I've dealt with global programming but if you think about currency values. They all have to be stored in a field that's big enough for the longest or most inflated currency like the Lira in Italy and they don't use a cents side (again I'm doing this from memory) while other currencies did which meant you had to keep the currency identifier so you would know what could add to what because you wouldn't want to add Lira to Pounds and you had to lay it out on a screen or piece of paper so it looks like Lira which is usually something like 100,000,000,000 where pounds are more like 34.32 and both have their own symbols to identify them which I'm not going to dig out the ASCII for but it's there in all those tables somewhere.

Even high-level languages usually have a way to intterogate each character within a date field using some type of inspect function or a string function where you give a starting position and a length that you want to compare. For example you have a date field and becaue your dates revolve around files you really don't have a need to get into fields but think about accounting where you want only the records for the month of April - now you have to interrogate that date field or use some function along with the date field to first of get the current year if that's what's required and then the month to create that report. If it's stored as YYYYMM you can just specify that the first 6 characters are 202004 and that will give you your data.

I hope this helped explain what I was talking about. I started in computers when the card readers where just being taken out of service thank God. But we a limited amount of time on what was called a dumb terminal because all it did was send commands to a mainframe somewhere in College Park Pennsylvania. You had maybe 15 minutes a day to work on your homework most was done on paper and then entered into the terminal and if you were lucky which no one was you would have a clean compile (no syntax errors) otherwise you had to wait until there was time to re-compile it. The more people on the system the less time you had. You would have several terminals setup to login so you could move between the terminals to get logged on. Even getting a connection was a matter of a queue. Someone would stay in the so-called lab and others might go smoke or do whatever and when the connections started coming they'd yell out to us and everyone would rush in. Now that's all local done on your own PC a very different world.