Spread Symbol Settings disappeared

[checkraise]

The Spread Symbol Settings window is blank today. I had dozens of pre-defined spreads in there last time I checked on Friday, but today it is completely blank. I've closed and restarted eSig and the Data Manager to no avail. Where did all these spread definitions go? Is there a backup file somewhere so I can access and recover them?

eSignal 8.0 (Build 782) on Windows 2000Pro SP4

[ACM]

checkraise
The spread definitions are contained in the spreads.xml file which is in the eSignal folder.
Alex

[checkraise]

Thanks Alex.

spreads.xml is empty except for this: <Spreads />

Anywhere else these might be? I can't believe the definitions would just disappear, and redefining all of them would be quite a chore.

[ACM]

checkraise
One thing you may want to try is search your hard drive for spreads.xml and see if by any chance you have more than one copy of the file.
Alex.

[checkraise]

Thanks Alex, nice idea but there's only one instance of spreads.xml, the empty one. Looks like I'll have to rebuild them all from scratch.

Last week I added a few spread definitions to Spread Symbol Settings, and when I started eSig later, those new definitions weren't there. I didn't think much of it at the time, I thought perhaps I had exceeded the limit of the number of spread definitions allowed, so I just added one more, which worked fine, and left it at that. I wish I had viewed that problem as a precursor to something more drastic going wrong like today's completely empty spreads.xml file, and had backed it up. I'm backing up my Time Templates file, Layout files, and Chart files immediately, and will do the same to spreads.xml once I've rebuilt it.

[TURLIES]

Hi checkraise,

I've had the same problem a few times before. What happened in my case was the spreads were not saved if eSignal did not close down properly - this was usually when i received a "crash error", either when i was using eSignal, or during a "save and exit".

The only solution i've come up with is to "save and exit" eSignal after i have typed in a couple of spreads, or even after a single spread. I then restart eSignal and check to see they are saved. This has worked fine so far.

Paul

[checkraise]

Thanks Paul,

I haven't had a crash in quite some time now, and I haven't seen any error reports upon exiting, but lately I have been opening and closing various layouts within the same eSig session, so perhaps I haven't been saving the layouts properly. It's terrible to lose all the spread definitions at once rather than just the ones recently added. Thanks for the explanation, I'll be saving all new spread additions to a text file and backing up spreads.xml religiously.