Capturing messages from the dialog debugger

Original Article Date: January 2003

Updated:  August 2010

Capturing messages from the dialog debugger

Ever wondered how to save those MicroStation Messages when the Dialog Debugger is enabled? Take a peek at this article to learn the keyins needed. With thanks to Bentley's Chris Marks for sharing this information!

Many times when you're trying to diagnose a problem, or simply just attempting to output a dialog's resource ID number, you'll use the keyin dmsg dialogdebug on to display any messages that may be generated.

With the help of the following keyins you can output the messages from the message box shown above to a text file.

DMSG OPENMSGFILE drive:\path\output.txt
Creates an empty text file that will be used to receive the messages. The successful creation of this file is reported on the right side of the status bar.

DMSG APPENDMSGFILE drive:\path\output.txt
Specifies the point at which to start recording to the output file.

DMSG CLOSEMSGFILE
Stops recording and closes the output file.

Note, the above keyins also support a forward slash (/)in the file path.

The end result is a text file that contains the messages as recorded by the DialogDebugger. Note that there are no "carriage returns"....all the data is captured as one huge text string.

To remedy this, simply open the text file in Excel and all will be well.

For further information on using this keyin to get dialog box resource numbers, please refer to:
Using keyins to toggle dialogs and toolboxes! .

AskInga Article #133