tray icon keeps disappearing

[MikeA]

It's possible I guess that using RDP could be an issue. Always use different Windows accounts and CQC accounts to log into the console versus RDP to avoid these types of issues.

You can restart the tray app via the start menu. It should be in there. You should generally right click on it and select Run as Admin to make sure it has the appropriate rights to start/stop services and such.

First though, see if it's in the task list still, i.e. it didn't actually die but got knocked out of the tray visually. If so, let me know, then go ahead and kill it and start it again via the Start Menu. That would tell me things to look for.

Are you actually using it for app control? What types of things are you doing?

OK, I think it is happening because I have been signing into a second session via RDP with the same user/password. I created a new user/password for my RDP editing sessions and things seem to be working reliably.

I am using app control to launch a movie on my media player client PC. It is used to open a movie .iso. .iso files are associated with a virtual drive loader, and once loaded (and decrypted by yet another program), the movie player loads. The key CQC role is just to open the movie .iso.

However, now I am having yet another problem. My movie preview template won't load because the BrowseTitle, BrowseArtist, BrowseStudio commands can't be found. The related command lines are turned into comments when I try to edit the preload actions for the template. Any thoughts on what might be going on here? This just started happening and might be related to some other edits I have done, either purposely or by accident.

[Dean Roddey]

The browse command thing is a breaking change that was introduced when we created the new client service. The old scheme was really clunky because it required getting data from the repo client in paged chunks, because pulling it all over every time you opened up a browser wouldn't have been feasible, and of course every different search or category would have been a different list of data.

Since the client service pulls the data over locally, the cover art browser doesn't use those browse commands anymore. Those basically work through a search now, which just works on the locally copied metadata. That means it's instantly available and you can scroll around within it. It can just grab references to all of the titles that match the search and not really move data around. It also means that, over time, we can add new searches of arbitrarily complexity since it's just search local in-memory data.

Normally we'd never purposefully do a breaking change like that, but in this case the benefits were so enormous it was justified. Anyway, there are new commands like search by audio format, search by actor, search by artist, and search by title. You'll need to replace your old commands with these new ones. Check the interface design guide docs in the CAB section for the new commands.

[Dean Roddey]

In the processing of porting the app control panel of the driver wizard forward and testing it, I may have found a candidate for the Tray Monitor Fall Down, Go Boom thing. Invoking this often causes the window activation to change to some external application, from the CQC application. That code tries to see if the new window is one of our windows (part of our underlying CIDLib framework.) In the process of doing that, it could cause an exception and that was not caught. That was happening in the context of the GUI thread, so that could have potentially caused such a thing.

[MikeA]

In the processing of porting the app control panel of the driver wizard forward and testing it, I may have found a candidate for the Tray Monitor Fall Down, Go Boom thing. Invoking this often causes the window activation to change to some external application, from the CQC application. That code tries to see if the new window is one of our windows (part of our underlying CIDLib framework.) In the process of doing that, it could cause an exception and that was not caught. That was happening in the context of the GUI thread, so that could have potentially caused such a thing.

Dean
I continue to have the tray icon disappear. Doesn't seem to be caused by accessing the client using RDP in a second session while the client is running a normal CQC session in my system. I am logging into the RDP session with a different windows user/password combo, and different CQC user/password combo, from the normal CQC login. EDIT- Just checked. I don't even normally login to CQC when doing an RDP session on this client. I just login to see how it is doing.
It just seems to disappear after several days. I started recording the behavior when I restarted it last night, so I can get some idea of how frequently it happens.
Thanks
Mike

[Dean Roddey]

The fix I mentioned above I've made in the 5.0 code base. So we can see if the issue goes away as folks start using/testing 5.0. If so, I can back-port it to 4.8 for those folks who won't be upgrading for a while.

[MikeA]

The fix I mentioned above I've made in the 5.0 code base. So we can see if the issue goes away as folks start using/testing 5.0. If so, I can back-port it to 4.8 for those folks who won't be upgrading for a while.

That is a good strategy, esp. if you are willing to back port the fix to 4.8.

That said, what are the risks in going to 5.0? I am still finding little nuggets of incompatibility, and a couple of broken features in 4.8, and don't want to go through that again if possible. If the upgrade from 4.8.x to 5.0 is 'seamless' and 'harmless' for my existing CQC design, I have no problem doing the upgrade.
If this has already been discussed, just point me to the right thread/post/whatever.
Thanks

[Dean Roddey]

The 5.x betas are well along by now, but of course you might find some quirks here or there. But they are generally getting fixed by the next day since I'm knocking them out as fast as I can in order to move towards 5.x. Of course let the installer back up your system so, absolute worst case, you could go back if you need to.

[Shaky]

I've been noticing this issue lately, i'm on 5.2.11. Until recently I had never needed the tray app running so may not have seen the behaviour before.  I now rely on StartRemApp as I'm running clients now not on the MS. When the tray app crashes startremapp no longer seems to function. I think that is because of the tray app going away on the Mater Server right?

Seems to crash after about a week. I can restart it as needed it seems.  What would you need to review this further or what should I do next time it crashes to help pinpoint?

Any other folks seeing this still?

[Dean Roddey]

Can you note the current memory usage and check it again in a couple days and see if it's gone up substantially or anything? That's probably not it, but long periodic failures like that can sometimes be of that sort. But it may just be croaking because something is happening when you try to actually run the program, so I'll check that. Of course check the logs and see if anything in there is from the tray app complaining about something.

[Dean Roddey]

For the many'th time I've looked through the Tray Monitor to find something that might be wrong, since various folks have complained about it falling over over the years, but yet again I can't find anything remotely wrong. No errors should be able to escape any of those remote commands. And I don't see how anything could be leaking.

Can you put it into high verbosity and just let it run that way until it croaks, then get me a log dump? Maybe that will get us some useful info. It's got to be something obscure.