Seriously: Don't do the following with your production database.

While I was coding my plugins, I just wanted to check something and did the following:

I went to Edit -> Crew, added a Group End divider and moved it into the very first slot.

I got a buch of Access Violations and then DVDP crashed.

Restart and selecting the profile -> Déjà vu all over again.

DB repair couldn't fix this (because technically there's nothing to fix).

Quoting Lewis_Prothero:

Quote:
hopefully it wasn't on your productive database.

No, when I'm coding I'm staying far away from my actual database.

I'vet tried to reproduce it at home. And while I do get the access violations, my Profiler doesn't crash.

That's at least something.

If you want to try to reproduce this, make sure you've created a new, empty database, so not to compromise your actual one.

1) Download (8717418032135 - Germany)

2) Edit crew and insert a Group End divider before director John Madden.

3) Save & closse profile

NAS-T indeed.

Other workarounds if DB Repair doesn't work, or if you can't edit the profile (I couldn't when I tried):

Any method of flagging the bad profile can be used, such as BulkEdit Collection/Flags/Flag Between, so long as you do not select the profile itself, then you can Collection/Flagged/Remove From Collection.

After that you can reload the profile in any way, such as BulkEdit load from XML, or DVD Add to collection, or Retore the profile from a previous backup, etc.

Perhaps, as someone said, this sheds some light on those mysterious startup problems. If you can figure out which profile is selected by default on startup, the problem is undoubtedly corruption in that particular profile. A startup CMD file might be used to force a different selected profile to recover in those cases. For example Load Flag Set, with only one profile in the list, could be used to select some other profile.

Quoting widescreenforever:

Quote:
first question:
Do we have group end  dividers for crew? (as per program 3.7?)

Yeah, in the regular editor.

Quoting TheMadMartian:

Quote:
Might be a stupid question, but why would you put a Group End Divider at the beginning of the crew list? 

You wouldn't, but good programming practice dictates that even unexpected user actions should never cause a crash or loss of data. You either have to:

- prevent the user from doing it, or
- prevent damage or inconvenience if he does

So programmers tend to notice stuff like that.

Thanks guys.  It wasn't something I had ever considered doing, under normal operations, so was just curious.  Makes sense now.

Quoting Blair:

Quote:
It's one of the adages for programming/software development: If it ain't broke, try to break it.

Yep; also the difference between Verification (it works properly if you do it right) and Validation (it doesn't mess up badly if you do it wrong)