From the Startup Launcher, I opened Options/Paths dialog and noticed that "Roots File Dir" field was empty.  I entered the path of the folder containing my artbase.roo (C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5).  I saved and closed that dialog.  When I refreshed the repository list, it still came up empty.  Why???

Back in the Startup Launcher now, I right-clicked the repository list to "Add Repository to List".  I entered "demo" in the "Database name" field and "c:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5\demo" in the Database Root path.  I hit the ok button and demo now appeared in the repository list.  That did the trick.  I was able to successfully open the "Family Tree" project that I'd worked on yesterday.  I made some changes to that project, successfully committed the changes, restarted MetaEdit, and logged into the demo repository without problems.

 

So I'm a happy camper now but a little curious about what caused this problem.  I have a hunch.  My repository folder is C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5.  I'm not sure why the MetaEdit installer chose that "Geoff Brown" folder.  My name is Geoff Brown but I log into my machine as "browng".  In the Vista User Accounts, there is "browng" but no "Geoff Brown".  Is this discrepancy what caused the problem?

 

 

Sorry to hear you hit a snag so early on, and thanks for the clear description. What you describe is something I haven't seen before, even on Vista. As I don't have a Vista machine here at home to test on, I'm just guessing for now (apologies for the resulting vagueness and incoherence!).

 

The MetaEdit+ shortcut sets the working directory to be whatever you chose as the repository folder when installing. That seems not to be set or not to be working properly. The Roots File Dir is normally empty, so MetaEdit+ looks in the working directory, where it will find the artbase.roo Roots File and repositories. But if the working directory is wrong in the shortcut, MetaEdit+ won't find the Roots File or repositories. If you then set the Roots File Dir by hand, MetaEdit+ will find your Roots File, and then expect to find the demo repository in the demo directory mentioned there. Since that's a relative path, it won't be found because of the still incorrect working directory, and MetaEdit+ will assume the repository has been deleted and helpfully tidy it out of the repositories list for you. (This only happens for cases where the repository name is the same as the directory name, and the directory is relative; handling these automatically lets the user just drop repositories into or out of the MetaEdit+ directory and have them picked up automatically.)

 

When MetaEdit+ is started at the end of the installer, our version of InstallShield doesn't allow us to specify a working directory, so we use the currentDir: parameter on the MetaEdit+ command line. It sounds like that mechanism worked, since you say the first startup showed the demo repository. Alternatively, something else might have been different from Vista's point of view because MetaEdit+ was started from an installer, and hence possibly with higher access rights.

 

If it's an access rights issue, maybe you could check that your user has Full Control (or at least Modify) rights for the C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5 directory and all its contents. You could also check whether your normal Documents folder is in a different place, e.g. C:\Users\browng\Documents, in which case you might want to move the MetaEdit+ 4.5 directory there instead.

 

I'd also suggest you check the "Start In" path in the MetaEdit+ shortcut. If that's correct but seems not to work, you could try editing the command line to add:

currentDir: "C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5"

 

Getting the working directory right will be important for things other than the repository list, e.g. the output of most generators goes to the reports\ subdirectory of the working directory.

You're right, although I could manually open the demo repository by adding it to my list, I ran into problems related to the working directory.  I got an error while trying to generate reports.

But all is well now because I took your advice.  I moved my repository folder to "C:\Users\browng\Documents\\MetaEdit+ 4.5" and added this to my MetaEdit+ shortcut command line:

 

currentdir:  "C:\Users\browng\Documents\\MetaEdit+ 4.5".

 

Thanks for the great advice, Steve.

 

When you exit and try to start MetaEdit+ again, you'll notice that there is no shortcut for it in the Start menu: you are back to being "browng", and the shortcut will only be visible when you log in as "Geoff Brown". Interestingly, if you log in as "Geoff Brown" and look at the shortcut in C:\Users\Geoff Brown\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\MetaEdit+ 4.5 Evaluation, you will see that Vista claims it is "Shared With: browng". The same is true for C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5. Sadly the "Shared with:" permissions are read-only, not enough for browng to actually use the repository.

 

When you created your own shortcut as browng, without knowing that setting the working directory is important, you ended up with the working directory being in C:\Program Files\MetaEdit+ 4.5 Evaluation. Vista will then do its virtualization trick so anything you write there, e.g. settings, actually goes into "Compatibility files" somewhere in browng's AppData folder, C:\Users\browng\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\MetaEdit+ 4.5 Evaluation. You could get the repository working if you set the Roots File Dir and demo repository path to be absolute paths in C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5, and gave yourself sufficient permissions on the contents. (Without write permissions you get an error "Database 'demo' is in an incorrect state" when logging in). To get the demo repository example generators working too, you'd need to set the path in Graph's '_default directory' generator path to to be absolute, C:\Users\Geoff Brown\Documents\MetaEdit+ 4.5\reports.

 

The best approach is thus to do what you did: copy the MetaEdit+ 4.5 directory from the admin user's Documents directory to your normal user account's Documents directory, and make a MetaEdit+ shortcut whose "Start in:" working directory points to this new directory. Using currentDir: in the shortcut's "Target" command line instead of setting the "Start in:" directory is also fine.

 

Thanks for reporting this: whilst MetaEdit+ runs fine on Vista in our experience, installer and permissions issues like this are an important reason why we want to do further investigation before adding Vista to the official list of supported platforms. With Vista UAC switching completely to an entirely different user account, rather than just elevating permissions, creating a good solution for all common situations will be an interesting challenge!

So far I'm really impressed by MetaEdit+'s sophistication.  I thought Spring and JBoss Seam were slick, but MetaEdit+ seems to lift developer productivity to a whole new level beyond those frameworks.  Great work!