About trail file function

PTC is quite used to Pro/e puking, blinking off, crashing, whatever you want to call its instability. They've devised a method of tracking Pro/e's activitity to try to identify where and how the problem occured. Sometimes, when you are dealing with their support people, they'll want you to send them a trail file. Trail files will be stored in a directory, identified in the config.pro as TRAIL_DIR, though, by default, it may place the files somewhere else until you give it a path name for this option.

However, since this file is a record of every menu pick the user made since starting a session, it can be useful for other things, such as recreating a part that got lost with a crash. This is not very reliable unless the part was created successfully before Pro/e crashed. Then you would have to edit the trail file to stop it before the crash occurs or you will simply repeat all the circumstances leading up to the crash and the crash itself. Kind of self defeating. Trail files also don't stop until you close the program, so the last thing in the trail is the program closing. That's not bad if it closes Pro/e after it saves your file. For file recovery, it's a huge pain. It is usually easier to pick an earlier numbered version of the file and start from there than it is to reconstruct a file from its trail. Also, most bench marking 'programs' for Pro/e are nothing more than trail files running Pro/e to check times for certain operations. This kind of trail useage is like a really big macro to perform certain tasks on the clock. The problem you'll run into with these is that the trail is very literal. You need to have everything set up, especially all the files it will be looking for in the directories where it expects to find them. If those directories don't exist or the files aren't in them, the trail file simply exits without comment. When baby burps, it never says 'excuse me'.

I cannot say that I have ever had a trail file rebuild a model successfully. Everywhere I trim the file back it crashes out, more than anything else it was a good idea that ends up gobbling disk space up.

-- Cheers

I used to copy analysis results (distances, areas, etc.) from the trail file to Excel to use in calculations. With ProE 2001, I just copy from the message log (Info/Session Info/Message Log).

Dave Parker

Hello, Does anyone read these ancient posts? I just ran my first trail file with Pro/E wildfire today and I was pretty happy with the results. I did have to go to the help first (I hit my speed dial for the PTC hotline, and while on hold, I found the help screen) Renamed the file, played it right into the crash again, Edited it once ... still crashed, edited a second time and it worked great. Where I snipped the file off was where I could see a whole bunch of "Spin" view manipulations that are basically repeated over and over.

To be fair, I was very familiar with this editing based on Mechanica use. Hope PTC keeps this around...

I edited a chamfer on a hole smaller than the hole by mistake... a couple of trips into the Quick Fix and the whole app went down.

-D

Bill McBride wrote: