Trouble saving from schematic symbol editor

[Dale Chisholm]

This began with some errors thrown when starting the schematic symbol editor, primarily in the atmel.lib. It appeared to be related to the mapping between the .lib and the .dcm files, relating to aliases. I chased down a few of the squawks and it looked like there were typos in the part names, or at least a discrepancy between the name in atmel.lib, and the name in atmel.dcm.

Then I edited some part symbols. When I went to "Update current component", I received an error: "An unhandled exception occurred. Press "Abort" to terminate the program, "Retry" to exit the program normally and "Ignore" to try to continue."

The problem was not consistent. Sometimes I could save the part to the library; other times I couldn't. Sometimes the error appeared when I "Update current component"; sometimes when I "Save current library to disk." After attempting a "Save" for a couple dozen times I still couldn't tell when thee error would, or wouldn't, happen.

I also observed that when I did "Update current component in current library", the icon for "Save current library to disk" became grayed-out (i.e., unavailable) - even though I had NOT actually saved the library file.

Finally, I suspect the *.dcm file is getting corrupted. If I enter an Alias for a part, it doesn't appear in the lists you see when you download a component for editing. I have also seen a few unfamiliar Aliases after saving a fileusually the main part's ID but with a "1" appended.

Dale

Application: kicad
Version: (2017-02-14 revision 877a65d)-makepkg, release build
Libraries: wxWidgets 3.0.2
           libcurl/7.51.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2j zlib/1.2.8 libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.16.1 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
- Build Info -
wxWidgets: 3.0.2 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.62.0
Curl: 7.51.0
KiCad - Compiler: GCC 6.3.0 with C++ ABI 1010
        Settings: USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
                  USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
                  KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=OFF
                  BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
                  KICAD_USE_OCE=ON

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

I confirm a serious issue when editing a library with aliases in symbol editor.

When editing a component with alias, if the alias is loaded instead of the root component, or if the alias is edited (for instance change a keyword) the alias list of the root component becomes broken.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision 9375e18fb66a3177b16cf55e0a2f1707feeaca5b
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=9375e18fb66a3177b16cf55e0a2f1707feeaca5b

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

I just pushed commit 9375e18fb66 which should fix the problem. There still may be some corner cases because there is about a dozen ways that the root alias gets updated which is really problematic. I still need to change the behavior of the plugin when removing or replacing aliases so it returns the next alias to the library editor. As of right now it always returns NULL which mean you have to select a new symbol to edit.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

@JP, did commit 9375e18fb66 resolve this issue for you?

On 2/15/2017 2:28 AM, jean-pierre charras wrote:
> I confirm a serious issue when editing a library with aliases in symbol
> editor.
>
> When editing a component with alias, if the alias is loaded instead of
> the root component, or if the alias is edited (for instance change a
> keyword) the alias list of the root component becomes broken.
>
> ** Changed in: kicad
> Importance: Undecided => Critical
>

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

Yes.
It looks good to me, now.

Thanks.