Puzzling behavior in updating MDG technologies

[edbridge]

For some inexplicable reason a working MDG was rendered temporarily unusable. Making a seemingly trivial change (color values in a shapescript) and recreating the MDG xml file resulted in several unexpected changes:
1. All shape scripts stopped being executed. The elements appeared as default EA shapes rather than that specified in the shape script.  Examining the xml revealed that somehow, the image field was gone from the xml.
2. One toolbox icon had the wrong image.

I was able to fix the first problem by simply moving the profiles in EA to a new containing package. All of a sudded the shapescripts reappeared.

The toolbox icon took longer to fix. Recreating the icon, changing its name etc. did no good. What fixed it was recreating the toolbox stereotype from scratch.

 It's now working but I wonder whether this is some subtle problem with corruption of data somewhere in the file? Has any one else experienced this? It's quite a time waster.

I'm wondering if some sort of hash check to detect corruption might be a helpful?  

[qwerty]

From my experience: MDG creation is like throwing dice. Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you aren't. And if you're not lucky the only chance is throwing the dice again until it works.

I'd be glad to see any debug/trace/log but I don't believe we will see anything like that.

q.

[edit:] see post below

[KP]

1. All shape scripts stopped being executed. The elements appeared as default EA shapes rather than that specified in the shape script.  Examining the xml revealed that somehow, the image field was gone from the xml.

On the Save Profile dialog there is a checkbox to include "Alternate Image". If you don't have this checked then you won't have shape scripts in your profile.

2. One toolbox icon had the wrong image.

This is very susceptible to small typos that are difficult to trace. The new EA 10 Beta introduces a set of wizards that assist in creating technologies. Hopefully they will make the whole process a lot less error-prone. We would be interested to hear feedback from anybody who has tried using them.

[edbridge]

Ah, yes the alternate image checkbox! I had noticed that was unchecked (not sure how) and checked it... but I don't remember when. That's likely why it began working agian. Thanks. I didn't think it was intuitively obvious that "alternate image" meants shape scripts, but that's how one learns.

As to the possibility of a path error, I was acutely aware of that. My procedure to make sure that wasn't the problem was to take the path string I was putting into the "initial value" field and test it using the command string in the Windows 7 Start dialogue. I pasted it in and made sure it brought up the right icon... repeatedly. In all cases it failed until I just recreated the stereotype and reused the string..at which point, success.  

I'm glad to hear about the wizard approach in version 10. I am anxious to see it.