Contents
Index
Lost/Invisible Dialog
I had an email from a frustrated user who took their Notebook into the field
and started GeoSurvey, pressed the Layers button and was stuck.
In the office they have a 2nd screen attached and usually the Layers dialog was displayed on that screen.
In the field, the 2nd screen was no longer present.
GeoSurvey could not detect that the screen was missing and displayed the layers dialog on the missing screen.
The user could not proceed with any other GeoSurvey options as it was waiting for the Layers dialog to close.
Looking into the GeoSurvey and Windows code, it seems to be impossible for GeoSurvey
to find out from Windows whether and screen is present or not.
Windows reports to GeoSurvey that the 2nd screen is present even when it is not.
The reason for this is that Windows mainly deals with Display Adaptors.
Thus Windows sees one display adptor which may have 1 or 2 screens attached at any time.
Also, some connections, like VGA are one way, so the PC (and Windows) does not know whether
there is a screen attached or not.
Summary: GeoSurvey cannot detect how many screens are present
Prevention
When you start GeoSurvey without the 2nd screen.
- Use the File/Program Settings/Reset Screen Window Position option to set all window positions onto the main screen.
How to Recover - 1
If a dialog is started (e.g. layers dlg) and it was last positioned on a screen that
is no longer present, you cannot see the dialog to close it.
In addition, you cannot proceed with GeoSurvey as it is waiting for the dialog to finish.
- Press the Esc key - that will often close the dialog.
- Then you can proceed with GeoSurvey.
- Then use the File/Program Settings/Reset Screen Window Position option to set all window positions onto the main screen.
How to Recover - 2
- Right click on toolbar to start the Task manager
- Select Processes tab
- Click on GeoSurvey in the task list
- Press the End Task button, or right click and end task option.
- Restart GeoSurvey
- Use the File/Program Settings/Reset Screen Window Position option to set all window positions onto the main screen.