After losing changes several times to my models, I finally figured out how molflow is saving files. The first time you save a new model using Save As, it saves it as a zipped xml file, and any subsequent saves using Save updates that zipped xml file.
However, if you exit the program and want to load your previous model you need to first extract the zipped xml file since molflow doesn't open zipped files. At this point I just assumed molflow saved it like it did before, as a zipped xml file. However, this is wrong, it updates any saves to the unzipped xml file that was loaded.
On the one hand it has caused me a headache of lost work, but constanly unzipping files because I thought that it had the most current saved changes was a bigger pain. Maybe having explicitly seperate Save As Zipped XML and Save As XML functions or as a file type selection in the Save As dialog box would help?
One other odd thing, which may be to the zip process, is the time stamp of my extracted xml file is 8 hours into the future from the zipped file. I'm 8 hours from GMT.
Hang on, Molflow does open zip files! I never would have designed saving/loading in a way that the user has to extract files using third-party tools.
I just checked it (with the latest 2.6.19 beta) and I could save and load a zip file (without any decompression before the loading). ZIP saving should be transparent, compressing and decompressing is done on saving/loading, with the benefit of having a (much) smaller file saved, and the drawback of somewhat longer saving.
The only thing I can imagine is that the "zip" file extension is expected to be lowercase, so "foo.ZIP" would need to be renamed to "foo.zip" to be recognized. I can change this as I admit it's not very smart, anyway file extensions are written lowercase when saving so usually it doesn't cause a problem.
You can save explicitly in xml, zip, geo, geo7z and txt formats by specifying the extension when you write the filename in the Save As dialog. If no extension is given, zip is added by default.
(I won't investigate the time offset now, as normally, when you save/load zip files, you don't really care about its content.)
Let me know if it works, and if not, please send me the zip file that doesn't open!
This is the error I get when trying to open a zipped file.
.
Opening the extracted xml file works. Though I do get other errors though when opening any xml file. Don't know if that effect the other error. FYI, I'm running molflow on Windows 7 Pro with Service Pack 1 on a macbook pro using VMware Fusion 6.0.6
Also, when trying to quit, molflow crashes instead.
Alan, could you please share any zip file that isn't opening with me (here or by email)? Also, does the "Open file" dialog look like the standard windows one, or is it a VMware fusion custom one? From the "cannot open molflow.cfg" message I suspect that the open file dialog changes the working directory.
