Finished first draft, now Seamly will not open the file! Help

I have enjoyed learning the program and had just finished drafting a one-piece block and related pattern pieces.

When I go into Seamly, all goes well until I try to open the specific file and I get this error after which the program simply closes: Critical Error Parser Error: Unexpected value “180” found at position 2. Program will be terminated.

I am able to open an earlier file, so it would appear that it is something that has happened to the specific draft file. Any ideas about what has gone wrong or how I can recover my work?

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Don’t fret… some of us are pretty good at fixing or recovering pattern files.

If you can post (attach) your pattern file and any measurement file here, someone will take a look for you.

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As Douglas said, the easiest way to deal with it would be to attach the file here for someone to fix it for you. But if the notion of fixing the broken file yourself is just appealing, you could open the .val with a plain-text editor, & see the XML markup in all its eldritch glory. Just be sure to make a copy before poking around at it.

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HI @Moot ! Welcome to the Seamly forum!
Yes, please upload your files here, we’re happy to fix it for you.

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And analyze maybe why there’s an error in the 1st place. :wink:

The fact that 180 is in the error suggests an issue with an angle (formula)?

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Amazing, thank you!

I have added a measurement set too, although I don’t suspect the issue is there

Ladies RTW UK14 C.vit (1.7 KB)

Ladies one piece block PS.val (20.9 KB)

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That was my first thought, however the file was working right up to the last save, and the final thing I did was start to delve into making pattern pieces from the block, so who knows :slight_smile:

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The only suspicious expression which I can find seems to be on line 165. There is a “rotation” with two arguments “0 180”. I don’t know how many arguments rotation does need - in a plane one angle should be enough.

To examine it further I need to install the actual version of seamly.

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Even if there is not an error in the measurement file, we need it to ooen the pattern file.

Anyhow, here’s your fixed pattern file. The issue was in the grainline rotation and length. For some reason to be determined, the rotation was “0 180” and the length “40 40”. Do you recall trying to edit a grainline?

BTW… grainlines are best “anchored” to a center point OR between two points… this keeps the grainlines within a pattern piece. I took the liberty to add anchor points and anchor your grainlines.

Ladies one piece block PS.val (20.4 KB)

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Thank you! I have just come here to say that I also found (and have just literally removed) those two details (I’ve never even tried looking at code before, so that was new), but searching for “180” indicated that the problem was in the grainline details. Then a further error showed me to edit the “40 40”. Not exactly supersleuth, but a previous comment about looking at the code in a text editor started me in the right direction.

Thanks so much for taking the time to look - I shall look at the anchor points you added.

As for “why” - I remember trying to add grainlines, and realising I didn’t understand how to place them yet moved them about a bit before attempting to delete them.

Still much to learn :smiley:

thanks again <3

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Thanks for the feedback. Theoretically the dialog should have shown an error, and NOT saved the eroneous values. I will need to keep an eye on the issue.

There’s a checkbox to show a grainline in a pattern piece. You can either enter the rotation and length manually or interactively move, rotate, and resize a grainline. If you anchor a grainline to a center point, you can rotate and resize it, but not move it. If you anchor between 2 points you can’t do anything with it, as it’s automatically rotated and sized to fit between the 2 points.

Anchor points need to be added to a piece in draft mode, which are then accessible in the dropdowns of the Workpiece dialog grainline tab.

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One. The 2 values produce an error in the math formula parser. The dialogs should be disabled from OK / Apply if there is an error in a formula… like if one typed “0 180” or “40 40”. Some where, somehow these 2 slipped through the cracks. Which is bewildering, as one would have expected to have seen more reports of this error long ago.

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