Recover Missing Elements from Your MicroStation Files

By Eiren Smith, Axiom’s Vice President for Technology – www.AxiomInt.com

Has this ever happened to you? You’ve been working on a design file for weeks. You’ve filled it with elements to your heart’s content. One fine morning, you load the file in MicroStation, and your eyes open wide in dismay. Hundreds of elements are missing from your design! What happened? Your design file fell pray to file corruption.

What you may not know is there’s a good chance that your elements are still in the design file. How could this be? To explain, let us take a small excursion. Think of a design file as a gigantic skyscraper; think of each floor of the skyscraper as a MicroStation element; and think of MicroStation itself as an elevator. To arrive at the bottom floor from the top floor of the skyscraper, an elevator has to first pass through each floor in between. MicroStation opens a design file in a similar fashion. To open a design file, MicroStation first scans the file from the top floor (in other words, from the first element in the file) all the way to the bottom floor (to the last element in the file). Just like an elevator would expect to find the bottom floor at the bottom of a skyscraper, MicroStation expects to find an “end-of-design marker” at the bottom of a design file. Simply put, the end-of-design marker tells MicroStation that the end of the file has been reached and that there aren’t any more elements to display. For various reasons (network glitches, hardware malfunctions, application errors and more), an erroneous “end-of-design marker” can wind up in the design file somewhere other than at the actual end of the file. The result: all elements after the erroneously placed end-of-design marker are no longer recognized or displayed by MicroStation!

The easiest and safest way to bring back your missing elements is by using Axiom’s FileFixer – the utility that lets you fix any MicroStation file automatically!

In this technical bulletin, I’ll show you how to set up FileFixer to recover elements that lie past an erroneous end-of-design file marker.

1. Select FileFixer from the Axiom menu [located on the MicroStation menu bar].

   

2. FileFixer’s main dialog box shows up. Make sure the repair “Mode” pull-down menu is set to “Automatic Design File Repair”.

   

3. Next, click on the <Edit List> button to select the MicroStation file that is missing elements. For the purposes of this article, we created and selected the file “eod-marker.dgn”.

   

4. Then, on the FileFixer menu bar, choose the “Options” menu and then choose “Repair”.

   

5. Once in the “Repair Options” dialog box, select the “Element” category.

   

6. Having selected the “Element” category, check the option “Recover elements past the end-of-design marker”. Click <OK> afterwards.

   

7. Back in FileFixer’s main dialog box, click <Start> to recover all the missing elements automatically.

   

8. After processing the design file, FileFixer prompts you to click the <OK> button. Notice that the dialog box states “Repaired files have .fix extension”. This is because FileFixer repairs a copy of your design file by default. This is a precaution to protect you in the unlikely event that the repair produces results that are less than perfect. You’ll always have the original file to go back to!