The Message Center displays information that can be very useful in a number of situations.

A day to day example:

Measure something and the results are displayed in the Message Center portion of the Status Bar:

Open the Message Center dialog and the measurement will be displayed there too, the latest message, in this case your measurement, will be selected when the Message Center opens:

just press Ctrl + C to copy the details to the clipboard.

e.g: True Distance = 891.9399m, Total True Distance = 891.9399m,Projected Distance = 851.9143m, Total Projected Distance = 851.9143m

For multiple measurements, select the lines that you wish to copy. Ctrl and Shift keys work in the usual manner to control your selection from the lines listed.

In some cases the messages will display additional text in the Message Details section of the dialog.

Saving messages

Right-click and pick 'Save Messages...' to save the messages and details to a text file. 

The default save location for this file is your project Out folder.

The active selection is ignored when the messages are saved.

Message Center Settings

There are two options. While turning on Display Debug Messages is unlikely to be of use in day to day operations, increasing the Number of Messages can be very helpful.

The default is 50, the number of messages output by some processes can exceed this, so if you are trying to capture more than 50 messages from the Message Center increase this number to an appropriate value:

Message Center Key-ins

expand echo $(<config variable>) is a useful way of checking the current state of a variable, it outputs the current values to the message center.

e.g: 'expand echo $(ms_cell)' lists all of the active search paths to cell libraries:

C:\ProgramData\Bentley\SharedContent\marlin_studios\;
C:\ProgramData\Bentley\SharedContent\xfrog_samples\;
C:\ProgramData\Bentley\SharedContent\dosch_design\;
C:\ProgramData\Bentley\MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries)\WorkSpace\system\cell\;
C:\ProgramData\Bentley\MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries)\WorkSpace\standards\cell\